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It was just past 3am, the witching hour fell on the idyllic Mille Fleur on the Savannah, and just like that a once beautiful home turned into the spookiest place in POS! This is the intro my Picassos got to our Halloween piece... 👻 The Picassos drew out a silhouette of Mille Fleur on black construction paper and then stuck them onto a scary painted background. They practiced drawing spooky elements like bare trees, cats, bats and witches on the white boards and when they were confident, painted them onto their paper. I have to say this was really fun and the children really got into this collage piece! Take a look :) 
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For our Halloween art piece the Doodlebugs are creating a super-cool scream painting. Not only do they have to draw a face that looks scared... and for that we talked about how your feelings show up on your face. We had some good fun changing our facial expressions... some of the kids made faces while others guessed what emotion was tied to the face. I introduced this little game using my emotion cards... Just simple exaggerated faces that show the basic emotions! You can see them 👇🏽  I guided them through drawing a frightened face and then they coloured them in. For an extra special bit of frightening flair, they used different colors to blow paint hair standing on edge! Take a look as they create some terrifying scream portraits!  When I told my Picassos that we were going to paint without paints I got two main responses... Some of them gave me the 😳 face "Well I guess today is the day.. . Miss has finally tipped over into crazy land" but some of my kiddos looked at me like 🤔 "ok I'm interested to see where you're going with this." I'd like to think that I can eventually convert all my kiddos into believers of my process lol... But we shall see 😆 Anyway, the children used chalk pastels to make a simple drawing of some colourful birds. (I brought lots of reference pics of finches, lorikeets, budgies and more.) Then I showed them the magic trick! They mixed up some liquid starch and I had them guessing what applying this mixture over their pictures would do and we set it up like a little experiment! They made a hypothesis or prediction of what would happen, they observed, tested and we drew our conclusion! Liquid starch lends chalk pastels some of it's viscosity! This means the chalk colours become easy to mix and blend just like paint and the results are nothing short of wondrous!   Teaching art in an environment as diverse as ours really is a joy and a privilege! Not only am I never in need of a topic (we literally sometimes have a celebration every other week 😀) but I also get to research and dig into different types of art that I might not ordinarily do and bring it to my art kiddos! So this week the focus is on Diwali as our Hindu brothers and sisters are about to celebrate the Festival of Lights! For our project we took a look at Rangoli... This is not my first rodeo into Rangoli 😂 check out the last time here... But we're doing it differently this time. They made some lovely designs drawing them free hand and then filled them in with colored salt to mimic the powder used in the real deal. Then they outlined with black glue to add a bit of KAPOW! Don't bother looking that up guys, it's another one of my growing list of nonsense words that the kids seem to love! The finished product pics were still wet but when the liquid evaporates the salt crystals dry and harden and the result is a fairly durable little decoration.  Although most of my Doodlebugs recognized the name Christopher Columbus not many of them showed any knowledge of the people that came before... which is not all that surprising since they range from 4+ to 6 in this class but they were very interested in hearing about them and of course they were thrilled when they realized we were going to make a head piece! They had a great time decorating their feathers and choosing designs for the headbands. Some of them worked together and it was lovely to see the sharing and cooperation going on people! I have to say I was super proud :) At the end I had them all saying Caribs and Arawaks... Turns out Arawak is a tricky word 😆  We celebrate the first people that settled in our beautiful twin islands soon so of course the Picassos and I took some time to explore what they knew about the Amerindians! Most of my smarty pants could chit chat about crops they grew and could identify the Caribs for their 'warlike' traits and the Arawaks for their peaceful nature. But I wanted them to go a bit further and we talked about some of the things they left us... Like a mortar and pestle, chandon beni and place names like Arima, Tunapuna, Mayaro and Couva to name a few. 😀 A few of my Picassos were very well-versed and I was very happy to hear them shout out place names and crops etc! But things really got interesting when I told them the story of Hyarima - the chief of the Carib tribe who escaped enslavement from the Spanish and spent his life protecting his people from the invaders. Hyarima is the subject of our art piece today... take a look as they paint their impression of this hero of our indigenous people. I just love that we get to practice our portrait drawing skills while learning more about our indigenous people 🤓  |
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Be a fly on the wall in our art room! Take a look at what we do, how we do it and the smiles that I get to see week after week :) Archives
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