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.

looking and seeing...

Every now and then I do a structured lesson where I direct the children with their drawing. Today I used Mona Brookes's book "Drawing with Children". In this book Mona breaks everything you draw into 5 basic elements. Circles (empty closed round shapes), dots (coloured round closed shapes) straight lines, curved lines and angled lines. To start the lesson we all looked at an object and considered what lines and shapes we would need to create a drawing of the object- surprisingly we ended up with the same kind of things that Mona would have suggested! ;)

From there we followed step by step instructions to draw a lion. We talked about how even though we would all be following the same instructions our final products might be quite different.

We also talked about how it is ok to make a mistake and this is not wrong but an opportunity to be a bit more creative to solve the problem of making a line that is not quite the way we want it to work for us in our art work.

Once the kids finished following my instructions they went on a "studio walk" to have a look at everyone else's work and see how they interpreted the instructions and solved any problems they had.

After the studio walk we thought about places we may find a lion and the kids were then able to create the rest of their art work from their own imaginations adding any other details they might need to make their drawings work.

They were given the freedom to select from a number of choices when it came to adding colour. So although we started with a lesson that was highly structured  listen and follow instructions it ended allowing children to explore ideas and medium independently in an unstructured way.