End of year Art

So you know how that last week is always really choppy and you never really get chance to sit down as a class and do anything productive...well we managed to find a little bit of time hear there and everywhere in the week to make 4 pictures which tell the story of our year as a class. We took 2 national/global events and 2 class events that I thought would be the most memorable and created art pieces around them...
1. 'The Olympics'
2. 'The Jubilee'
3. 'Our trip to the seaside'
4. 'Our trip to the butterfly house'

They look really great and were really easy to make:

1. Make a frame or buy one (I made a simple frame from 4 pieces of wood)
2. Grab a square of fabric, best to use white.
3. use a selection of different soft papers such as tissue paper and crepe paper and LOADS of watered down PVA glue and keep gluing and layering the colours up until the whole piece of fabric is covered.
4. Add pictures/objects/text on top when it has dried!

For our Olympics picture:
We used white for the background and then went crazy with the silver glitter to create a really lovely textured effect. 

We added 5 rings...

...and a gold torch

 For our Jubilee picture:

We used red, blue and white for the background to represent the flag but in the end it created a great 'confetti' effect

We also added a crown and '2012' to create a 3D effect...nice and simple

For our 'seaside' picture:

we were careful to split the fabric in half to create a beach and a sea

we collected loads of interesting shells on our trip and I carefully glue gunned them onto the canvas

Then we added fish and a crab to finish it off!

For the butterfly house picture:

We wanted the picture to stand out so we aimed to use 3D effects

we stuck our butterflies on so they stood out to make the picture have a 3D effect.

We used the skills that the art teacher had taught us to create effects on acetate

we added some other insects using the same 3D effects!

Have a go yourself at home or with your class, the effects were really easy and it looks great!

Enjoy!

Animals Displays

For our last theme just before Easter we looked at animals and here are 2 displays we did on that theme, the first was a really simple display that our art teacher did about animals under the sea:

The sea animals were made using coloured acetate and glass pens and they made sea plants and grasses for the base.

The second is one I did with my class - we went on a trip to the zoo and before we went we looked at animal prints and identified different animals by their prints, as part of this we make some collage board and made a 3D display of animal prints and we added some of the pictures we took when we got back. Quite effective really.

Enjoy!

Oh help...Oh no...It's a Gruffalo!

Well last half term our topic was animals and we therefore studied the book 'The Gruffalo'. It coincided nicely with World Book Day so we did loads of drama work around an adapted version of the story and performed it for the school as part of a Performance Poetry project. For the performance we made some great masks from a template which you can get on the TES: http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Forest-Animal-Masks-Fox-Owl-Snake-Mouse-use-with-The-Gruffalo-Percy-the-Park-Keeper-etc-3004955/ and we found a Gruffalo template on the official site as well.

We also made some description cards which took a couple of days to make but looked fantastic! The students LOVED making these as we used modroc to build up the key features on each card and then we covered them with tissue paper and watered down PVA to create a papier mache effect and then to finish it off we painted round the edge of each card with a light blue. Students held these up in turn as we read through the poem. They look really effective and everyone commented on how great the work looked.

We also used these as part of our story each week and it really got the students engaging with the repetative verses and it acted as cued articulation.

Take a look:

     

 

 

 

We also linked this to Maths with a great game:
http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Build-your-own-Gruffalo-Game-3005650/
We found that the board game was a little much for some of our students to we played it like a simple beetle drive or a 'Gruffalo Drive'. Download from the link.

Enjoy!

Geography: Chinese display

And it's complete!

Each week we have added a new element to our display and here it is:

Chinese blossom, dragons, koi carp and lastly...the sensory map...enjoy!

Geography: sensory map

The sensory map is great for any cultural units. Out theme this half term was china, therefore in geography each week we have taken a different symbol of china and investigated it. This week we looked at Chinese food which linked to our food technology units.

We had 10 dried foods: green tea, cherry tea, seaweed, star anise, ba Wang flowers, noodles, rice, wolf berry, black fungi and (the stinkiest) dried anchovies.

We started in circle time by smelling and feeling the products then moved onto some group work. Each group had 5 foods to stick on the map, while 1 group was sticking the other group was filling in thumbs up and thumbs down questionnaire to assess if they liked or disliked the smell and feel of all 10 foods! Great activity because the non smelly foods had great textures and the other foods either smelt awesome or absolutely disgusting!

Just be warned your room will stink of fish if you use dried fish but it's so worth it!

Check out the pictures...

Oh...if your doing this for a display like myself make sure you PVA over the top...otherwise your inquisitive students may end up with a mouthful!

The completed map along with Widgit symbols

Clockwise from the right: Wolfberry, Seaweed, Green Tea, Ba Wang Flowers and Star Anise

Dried Anchovies (they stink!)

Seaweed and Noodles

Chinese Koi Carp Display

Yesterday we looked at our third symbol of China, we've had blossom and dragons and now some impressive koi carp! This activity was just short enough to keep the attention span of the class and looks really effective. I introduced it with familiar Chinese objects again and we watched a video of koi carp and talked about why they are symbolic of China. Then got to the good stuff...the art...what do you think, feel free to leave me a comment!

It looks very impressive as a whole display but each element on its own looks good all the same.
Check back next week for the last element and the final unveiling of the China display as a whole!!

Chinese Handprint dragon

Great idea for any Chinese New Year display work you have planned. As part of our Geography project each week we are looking at a different aspect of Chinese culture. This week we made two dragons, a giant dragon body (which is yet to have a head) which I will post a picture of soon, and a great little hand print dragon for a display, which has drawn a lot of attention on the corridor!

My students loved it because it was messy and very tactile but at the same time we were able to think about what a dragons body may be like, it could have scales which are represented by the hand prints and we chose colours at represented china by looking at a range of different artifacts. I then crafted a head for the display.

Not a bad job I wouldn't say!

Chinese New Year display

So being Chinese New Year this half term our theme of 'Oriental' which is actually a pretty great theme!

Today we started to look at China as a culture and in particular Chinese cherry blossom, we are going to looking at the Chinese new year story 'the great race' so I started our display today. We made a 3D cherry blossom tree by stringing together tissue paper 'blossom' like you would do with popcorn, it made a pretty great effect. For students who have the fine motor skills to be able to do it this is a great activity, very simple, very repetitive but very enjoyable.

For those who were not physically able to do this we made some lovely blossom pictures which will be mounted and displayed later on in the half term. We stenciled the branch on and then simple applied the blossom with scrunched up tissue paper, the effect was really great!

Special People and Winter displays

In the second half term of this year it was all about Christmas...well actually no it wasn't we only had 2 weeks of Christmas. Firstly we were talking about Special People as a theme.

Art was great, students were able to make some fantastic photo frames but I don't have any pictures of theme...sorry.

BUT...we did look at King and Queens, we did a great reenactment of the war of the roses in the playground, but firstly to highlight the two houses we made two emblems, one white for the house of York, one red for the house of Lancaster. We also made some 'tags' which you can see down the side of the display, these were for our reenactment: each team had to grab the tag of the other team, if someone grabbed your tag then you were out, the last colour to be left in the game wins. Lancaster or York?? try it out and see!

We also made some swords with foil and sandpaper as part of a history/science project about materials.

So like I said...it wasn't all Christmas but we did enjoy a bit of winter fun with this display...We made a frost display about our whiteboard with loads of different tactile materials and some lights. We have tinsel (very Christmassy, some cheap battery lights from ikea, some snowflake decorations and loads of different tactile materials to frame it down the side! Take a look

It looks even better with the room lights off and the fairy lights on...this isn't the best example...my flash was on!

And here you can see the types of tactile materials we used down the side to frame it all...

we had an abundance of lace and furry white fabric but the best by far was the bubble wrap...everyone loves to pop bubble wrap whatever your age! And for any students you may have in wheelchairs what a fantastic sound it makes when you run over it!

Noah's Ark and Weather Autumn displays

Here are some of the displays we did in our first half term of 2011-12. Our theme was weather so what better story to study than 'Noah's Ark'. We made a lovely display which linked to maths:

We made clouds with loads of different tactile materials including, fabric, netting, cotton wool, wool and felt. Our collage waves also acted as a number line which can be used for rote counting and as a reference for maths counting activities.

For lower level students the letter raindrops also acted as a number line, however this time just up to 8, the raindrops rotate which means students can use them to 'fill in the missing number'.

Also as part of our weather theme our art teacher made a great weather map of Yorkshire. The map is a collage and all of the weather symbols were made by students and then laminated, they were then stuck on the map, however they are interchangeable as they were stuck on using velcro. In the last lesson students were able to create different effects using pencil crayons to make a header. 

Display Work

I am trying to put a slide show on the blog to add display photos to, some that me and my team have done and some that I have shamelessly stolen! But it just does not seem to want to work for me!
So until then  will post the pictures.

Last year we did some quite interesting displays. One topic - Africa was great for display work.

We printed curtains with homemade African printing blocks, we made masks which we then used for some green screening and we charted where food comes from in Africa using a multi sensory food map of Africa, everyone got to smell, feel and in some cases taste the foods and then we stuck it onto the map which was used for out lovely display. Just remember if your using lentils some students may be allergic (which I found out) and also chili...be careful, we PVA'd over the whole thing to make it safe for display. We also did some African drumming and looked at the story of the lion king to go along with this!

Second piece of work we did was for the theme of 'Under the Sea'. Loved this theme - and what other book could you do other than the 'Rainbow Fish'. Great P.S.H.E. links here as well. From the story we made this display:

We used this to make reference to as part of our story and my class loved finger painting the octopus and really enjoyed painting their fish and decorating with multi coloured scales. Our partner class also created the most amazing ceiling display by handing netting from the roof between the two classrooms and using it like a fishing net and putting loads of different models of sea creatures in and loads of green tissue paper for seaweed which the students loved! Unfortunately because this was last year I do not have a picture of this!

From this we adapted the story...I got students to think about applying the story to a different animal and we came up with 'Rainbow Bird' and we acted out the same story line with these new animals. We ended up with this display which we were able to use to track the story.

I will add some more display photos from this year in the new year when I get back to school.