Building on our experiments.

On my most recent trip to Europe I spent a week in London and whilst there I visited the TATE Modern. An afternoon strolling around the Paul Klee exhibition inspired some ideas for lessons this term.

All classes from year three to seven have been focusing on the art work of Paul Klee. my last post showed how we experimented with lines and mark making. The children in year 4-7 have been working on projects based around "taking their line for a walk" (Paul Klee is renowned for saying a line is a dot that went for a walk and drawing is taking a line for a walk.)

The year threes however have looked at a different style of work by Paul Klee where colour and shape is the focus.

 They started by discussing the painting to identify the types of shapes they could see. This was a great opportunity to link maths and art using the terms to describe the geometric shapes or regular shapes that Klee uses in his art works of this type. We compared them to organic or irregular shapes and recorded this information in their visual diaries.

Then came time to play with some 2D maths shapes to construct and record as many different building shapes usiing the simple squares, rectangles and triangles.

 These ideas were then used to create a colourful collage of buildings on a coloured ground.

They finished by making a quick two sentence reflection on their work in their visual diaries. 

 I like how I ...

But I think it would have been even better if I ....

Happy New Chinese Year!

In this year of celebrations and in making links with the new Australian History curriculum last week we did activities using Chinese New Year as a focus. We discussed what types of things people did to celebrate this event and then why it is we know about Chinese New Year here in Australia. This lead to a bit of a discussion about immigration at different levels from year one upwards!

Yr 1 & some yr 2 classes made Paper chain dragons.

 

The Yr 3 classes made Folded paper spring dragons.

These 'puppets' were so much fun to play with! And obviously pretty special!

 

(PS: One older sister told me that her brother slept with his dragon on his bed! Cute!)

Those kids in mixed year 2/3 classes had the choice of either type of dragon- most chose to go with the paper chain one. I think it was because the paper chain ones could be made really long and this became a great game of measuring the length of their dragons to see who had managed to make the longest one with their two coloured paper squares. Maths meets art!

The year fours used line to create drawings of Chinese dragons. They had to include lines that showed movement and create patterns with lines rather than colouring in areas of their drawing.

What style!

Over the last week or so most of the classes have been watching this film animation that illustrates how Mondrian's art work changed over time from representational to pure abstraction.

Depending on their year level the children have been creating artworks inspired by Mondrian using different medium. Some classes are using artline markers to create thick and thin black lines and will complete them using liquid watercolour paints.

Many of the classes in year 1 to 4 will be creating collages using pre-cut black paper strips and colourful paper rectangles. (I saw this idea somewhere in the blogosphere and thought it was a good one as I have tried this many years ago with younger children and they find it difficult to cut many even strips of paper and the skill of cutting overtakes their "arts ideas" or  artistic choices and arrangement of line, shape and colour. However I have encouraged kids to trim down their pre-cut shapes into sizes that suit their work better)

These are some of our year ones busy working on their De Stijl art works.

Year 1s meet Monet.

 

As I mentioned in my first post,I recently travelled to Europe. While I was there I visited Monet's garden and bought this book called Katie Meets the Impressionists. 

I used the book to introduce the junior primary children to the impressionists, in particular Monet. We created fields of poppies inspired by Monet's work,

These art works were created over two sessions. Following the story in session one the kids created light and dark green using their fingers to mix cool blue and cool yellow with a mid green to make a selection of light and dark greens for their background.

At the beginning of the second session we learnt about the colour wheel and warm and cool colours using this video. (Be warned the music is a tad repetitive but the little kids seemed to like it!)

We created poppies by cutting or tearing warm red and orange paper, pressing them into our palms to create a 3D effect. We talked about how we could make some poppies look closer than others by making them bigger and putting them towards the bottom of the page.

Very pretty!