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.