In our last class we talked about whales! The intention of this project was to engage the imagination. What floats on the surface of the ocean? How big is the whale compared to the vessel? Of course they also got some hard facts to work with so we took on a short documentary on different types of whales... they learned some pretty cool facts and of course of things we were familiar with from before. This piece also gave them the opportunity to play with creating tints and shades as the water appears to get lighter as it gets closer to the surface.
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Last day the children listened to a lovely story Over and Under the Pond. The mother tells her son there's a secret world underneath their boat, a world of minnows, crayfish, turtles, bullfrogs, and tadpoles slowly growing into frogs, learning how to hop on newly developed legs. So today we are adding the details! Lots of drawing, cutting and sticking and they each decided what animals they wanted to add and where to place them. Then they cut them out and collaged them onto their background. Based on the book The Honeybee by Kirsten Hall, the Doodlebugs drew a simple honeybee and created a beautiful soft pastel background. Science & Nature Connection: We talked about how honeybees are important in nature because they pollinate fruit, vegetables and flowers. They learnt that pollination causes plants to produce seeds, which is a key part of the life cycle of plants. We also discovered with the help of this delightful book that honeybees live in a hive where there is one queen bee, lots of female worker bees and male bees called drones. The worker bees are the bees that leave the hive to search for pollen and nectar. If you see a honeybee, you don’t have to be afraid. Though the bee has a stinger, she will only use it if she is threatened. She is out looking for food and she is not interested in people! We're starting off the term with this gorgeously illustrated picture book as the inspiration for our art piece. The story follows a curious young boy and his mother as they paddle across a pond. We get the chance to talk about ecosystems and food chains and how the cycle of life is all connected. For our art piece, the Picassos have started to draw and paint their pond ecosystems and in our next class they will add details like leaves, rocks and of course some animal life! Check out what they've done so far!
This week the Doodlebugs learned all about frogs! Bull frogs to be exact! We took a look at the life cycle of the bull frog and a lot of them could identify the stages. I love when we get to work a little science into our class and this was definitely fun for both the boys and girls to look at pictures of the different stages and learn just how BIG a bull frog can get! Then of course we got down to drawing and painting our own fantastic frogs! Take a look at them in action :0 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! |
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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
February 2020
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