Lots of Lino

Today the children from rooms 25 and 3 started printing with fabric ink onto or lengths of curtain fabric. These will be used as backdrops for our Cultural presentation day and then turned into much needed curtains for the music room.

The children also had the opportunity to create a run of four individual prints for themselves on paper. These ones will come home at the end of the year. 

Once they had printed or were waiting for their turn to print the children began to write a procedure outlining how to make a Lino print.

To make the turn taking fair the kids grab a peg from my numbered peg station. When the printmaking station is free I call out the next number. This saves a lot of time where they would otherwise be waiting in line for their turn.

There are some great designs! They look fabulous together. I can't wait to see the whole lot completed!

More printmaking.

Our older children are also exploring printmaking. 

Following last terms incursion of an African drumming group, we looked at Adinkra cloth from Ghana. The symbols on this cloth all have meaning and are made with a combination of simple geometric shapes. The children used these ideas as inspiration to create their own symbols that have meaning to them. 

They are using Lino printmaking techniques, transferring their designs onto the Lino and carving away the negative space. 

These designs will be printed onto fabric to be used as backdrops for our upcoming Cultural Presentations where the kids will share what they've been doing in Art,LOTE and Music. After this event the backdrops will be made into curtains for the music room. 

Planning the design.

Transferred onto Lino. 

Carving CAREFULLY!!!! 

Using a bench hook,

Making sure our fingers are BEHIND the carving tool

and we are carving away from them.

Doing our best to follow the 'No blood in the art room rule' ;) fortunately only a couple of mishaps!

Artist proofs (first test prints to check if the printmaking plate is ready)

They are going to be great backdrops! 

Printmaking on the go.

This term the year 4s are doing printmaking. Today they have prepared their printmaking plates. Next week will be messy! I hope they remember to bring their art shirts or wear their old uniform shirts! 

Bottle for Botol

Boy this term has been busy and we're only a week and a half into it! There are lots of projects on the go but the one I want to talk about today is Bottle for Botol.

Last year I met Christine, young Australian of the year finalist for 2016.

'Christine Parfitt, 29 of Cottesloe has a passion for marine conservation and is undertaking a PhD in Environmental Education. She developed Bottle for Botol, partnering Australian and Indonesian students to reduce their consumption of single-use plastics. Her charity has worked with over 12,000 Australian students and 7,000 Indonesian students to raise awareness of the detrimental impacts of plastic on the marine environment. Since 2013, more than 100,000 plastic cups and bottles have been saved from release into the ocean, with numbers expected to be over one million this year.' (From Young Australian Awards website)

The Bottle for Botol programme sounded just right for our school, combining sustainability, Indonesian and Art. After meeting with Christine she was keen to have our school on board. Room 2 have been using this as a focus for their class work about Asia in geography. Christine came into the school and spoke to them and in art they are creating an animated film to introduce Pally to our Bali partner school.

All classes from year 4 upwards and some year 3s will participate in a competition to create a design one of which will go onto the stainless steel water bottles that will be sold later in the year in a fundraiser - more information about that closer to the time. 

 

To help us understand the need for the Bottle for Botol programme the children viewed a video about our water supplies and how we are able to drink clean safe water from the tap. We had discussions about why this might not be the case for all countries, Bali being one many of us are familiar with from our holidays. We dicussed ideas of sustainability and conservation as well as the differences between the flora and fauna of each landscape ( Perth and Bali) in order to develop the ideas for our designs.

 

The children will be writing explanations of why they chose the symbols and colours in creating their design in following lessons.

In order to select the most popular design to go onto the bottles there will be an online voting site where family and friends can support our school and our designs. I will post this information in the next week or so. 

If you are interested at having a closer look here is the link to the Bottle for Botol website. 

http://www.bottleforbotol.org/

 

Now I have the unenviable task of selecting the top few from each class so room 2 can help me come up with the top three designs for everyone to vote for online. ( I hate doing this bit because I know how much effort each child has put into their work and there are so many good ideas! )

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.