The Magic Dot: Arty Adventures in January!

Welcome to the Lower Primary Artroom where we bring you excitement, creative fizz and fun every day !!!

January has been busy and your Lower Primary Children have been beavering away at a whole plethora of delightful projects which we reveal right here......

Reception 2 artistes ....

You may be aware that your R2 children have been studying a classroom unit called

"The Ups and Downs of Hong Kong". Children have visited the Peak and have looked at the spectacular buildings and the layout of our home town Hong Kong.

In art, we directly connect with that learning, by helping students to develop awareness of their surroundings and to ask questions about that. We take their observations and help to extend those and craft those into the creation of a real life Art Canvas.

We began by going outside and asking some questions about what we can see.....all pictures start with a background, so we began by asking:

What colour is the sky ? What does the sky tell us about the time of day ?

The realisation was that the sky can be many colours according to the time of day or the weather, so people chose what kind of sky they would like to depict.

Then we learned how to use watercolour paints and " big arm strokes" so that we could paint the sky that was in our mind.

Next we went outside again to study the landscape, we looked at Hong Kong mountains and used Magic Finger to draw these, ask your child what Magic Finger means..

We tore our green papers to create bumpity hills, some close and some far away.

Then we looked at the faraway hills on our Hong Kong photos and noticed that the buildings were very small.

Try asking your children why faraway buildings are so small ?

So the scene is set.........as you can see and ready for the next exciting stage !!!

Following up the Repulse Bay Temple visit we showed the R2 children various Hong Kong Temples, asking:

What do you notice?

What do you see?

What do you wonder?

Each person worked with a temple photograph, and we began by identifying the main shape of the building and planning what might be required to create that...

People chose their building shapes and added in rooftops too.

Ready for the next exciting steps........if you feel like taking you child to a Chinese temple in the next few weeks that would really help them to observe and notice details for their artwork!

Grade One Creative Light-beings!

Your Grade One angels are currently studying Life cycles in the classroom and loving all the experiential learning with their plants and mealworms as might have heard !

In art we have taken a Big Picture approach to this project and having established exactly what a " cycle" is we are looking at the giant cycles that govern our daily lives.

Ask your children what a cycle is............

As you can see we are creating a on a circular surface and have used our "cycling" arms to set the scene for the solar system.

We borrowed the Middle School planetry model to study how all the planets rotate in a cycle around the sun.

Ask your children how long it takes for our planet, Earth to rotate around the sun

Ask them what happens as it spins.

The we created the sun itself.....

Can you guess what is going to happen next .........

Take a look at this website with your children:

http://www.kidsastronomy.com

Grade Two Creative Angels

Remember last month when we showed you the start of the Grade Two landscape sketching project ?

Heres a refresher in case you missed it !

Having taken photographs from all of the Grade Two Classrooms, we went on to use our observational skills to sketch from these images.

Breaking the view down into Background, Middle Ground and Foreground.

Having completed the sketch, we used highlighter pens to identify each area.

Then people set about making the picture in layers using thin card to create a " relief" image.

So at this point we could FEEL the picture more easily then see it !!

The final product is called a Collograph:

The word is derived from the Greek word koll or kolla, meaning glue, and graph, meaning the activity of drawing.

Ready for the Magic !!!

Once the Collograph was ready, it was time to roll printing ink over the top of it...

Are you watching ?

There it is, all covered in pink ink, then a piece of paper was placed over the top of it and more rolling occurred, until it was time to peel back the paper and reveal the image below:

Tada.................A Collograph PRINT!!!

This is a very exciting and magical process as the outcome can be unpredictable and so its exciting ! Students were able to realise that the detail was depicted by the textured papers they had used as well as by the amazing observation work they had done in the first place.