Hoot! Wise words.

Some of the junior classes have made mixed media art works inspired by the owls that were at a recent Harry Potter fundraising event.  

We've been looking at how basic shapes can be used in drawing this term. 

The children looked at many different styles of owl drawings and observed the basic shapes they used. 

From these observations we made a 'recipe' for drawing an owl. Eyes, head, body wings beak etc and the types of shapes we could use for each part.

The children then drew their owl - in their own style! 

They explored chalky pastels to add colour and patterns to their owl.

Next they painted branches using thick paint and created leaves using collage paper, cutting or tearing their leave as desired. 

  For this project I broke out the glitter to add stars to the background of their work.  

  Last of all they glued it all together. 

Some classes had time to add a written component. We thought about the saying "wise old owl" and used speech bubbles to add a wize or clever fact. The year 2/3 and yr 3 classes transposed this to text using quotation marks and proper punctuation.   

Magic movies.

One of my year 6 classes have just finished creating animated movies using shadow puppets from a previous activity. We have 5 iPads to share in the art studio so the children had to work collaboratively with five or so others.

 I selected the groups of children that would not normally choose to work together and appointed a group leader who was to make sure everyone was involved.  They had to use one puppet from each person in their group and come up with a story to animate. They had freedom to explore their backdrops using materials from around the room. 

After finishing our work we reflected on what made a good collaborative group. All groups agreed that cooperating and listening to each other's ideas was important as was coming to a consensus or using a bit of everyone's ideas somewhere in their film. The other thing was to make sure everyone was involved with jobs to do and making sure everyone had a turn at 'the fun stuff' 

My other year 6 classwill be starting theirs very soon. Theirs will be slightly different because theirs will be linked to their water wise, environment and geography units. 

Art club today.

Every Tuesday lunch time I open my doors for kids to come and explore their own ideas in a self directed way. Some kids bring projects from home others just enjoy a creative safe space. Here's what was going on today in art club.

Just gorgeous

Observed in today's yr 5 chalky pastel landscape activity.

 

Lovely landscapes.

The children in years 4 and 5 have been learning about how diminishing, one point perspective is used to create a sense of space. 

We thought about a place that our puppets might live in when coming up with ideas.

The year threes in the 3/4 class also did landscapes. They were not required to use one point perspective but many of them found it intriguing and decided to give it a go. The results are pretty stunning!

 

Animation fascination

The year 6 kids are using their puppets made in previous lessons to create some animations.

I selected groups (not the people they would usually choose - just to mix it up a bit ), the children had to select one puppet created by each person in the group and come up with a little story. 

Some kids spent time creating interesting collage backgrounds and props,

Some kids got right into it .... and had to start over,

All of them seemed to enjoy it! 

Next week we'll do some more. ( Then I'll need to figure out how to upload them here! )

 

Lovely Landscapes

Having made our puppets several classes wrote character descriptions about one of them. After describing their physical features, skills or talents and personality the children thought about where their puppet character might live. 

These ideas were realised in the form of wax resist landscapes. 

The pp/1 classes worked from their imaginations. We talked about the foreground and the background of the picture and ways to show textures for grass and leaves. We also recalled how we can use basic shapes to build a drawing.

The yr 2/3 class discussed Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' first, looking at the lines the artist used and how space was shown in the painting. We observed things were high or low on the page, big or small and overlapping. 

I demonstrated how to create a wax resist drawing - keeping firm pressure on the crayon to ensure it covered the paper so that the paint would roll off the coloured section when watery paint is applied with a soft bristle brush.

The settings ranges from tropical islands, seaside shacks to busy cities and magical forests. Great use of imagination and some lovely work.