Lions, tigers and bears!

Because I have been doing writing along with my art lessons I've been looking for ways to combine both. I thought this art work was a perfect way to inspire writing, developing ideas and sequencing events.

Traumgarten - Henri Rousseau 

First of all we discussed the art work using the VTS strategy. This strategy encourages children to make inferences and back them up with evidence in the art work. It also highlights that people have differing opinions and that is ok. We thought that maybe the man in this painting played his ukulele to tame the tiger so that he could get on his back. ( Don't worry - we know that art isn't always real, it's a bit like magic an artist can make anything happen! 😉) 

Yr 3

 Once we discussed the art work I had them imagine that they could tame an animal that lives in jungle or forest .... or the bush ( some kids really really wanted to tame an animal from Australia! So I had to acquiesce!

Yr 1

 They had to come up with an explanation for why they were in the jungle and how they managed to tame their wild animal. 

Yr 3

Once they had their ideas they made drawings of themselves on their animal, including any special thing they may have used to tame their animal. Once this was done some of the classes wrote the beginning of their story. 

Yr 1

 The next step was to look closely at the shapes of the jungle plants Henri Rousseau used and then use these ideas to draw their jungle around their drawings, filling the page.

Pre primary

 At this stage those classes doing writing continued to write their stories, having adventures in the jungle with their animal making sure that at the end of the story everything was wrapped up, making sure the reader was satisfied and had no questions at the end.

 Yr 2

Last of all we painted the drawings using watercolour techniques. 

Yr 3