Contemporary art

It was such a great day at school today even though quite a few of our friends were not in class. We started off playing on the mat and then had snack time which was quite a bit earlier than usual. We sat at two small tables as our large “work in progress” was on the large table, waiting for us to work on it further. But before we worked on it, we had a discussion about animals and sang our “Hello” song. Shelley made some animal noises and we guessed which animals belonged to which noise! She growled like a lion; meowed like a cat; barked like a dog; tweeted like a bird; trumpeted like an elephant; snapped her arms like a crocodile and said that she didn’t really know what sound a giraffe makes. Well, neither do we so we couldn’t help her. Then she showed us the plastic animals and asked us to find the corresponding one which was embossed on a stamp. We all had a turn to do this and matched the animals perfectly. Then we sang our “Hello” song slightly differently. We held our arms so that they looked like the large jaws of a crocodile and this is how we sang the song. It was so much fun. We noticed that at the end of the plastic animals there was a long piece of string. We were going to use the animals and the string to do string painting with. We lifted the painting up, placed our string where we wanted to, folded the painting over and then pulled the string out. The effect was so beautiful. Kana made a frame for the painting using blue cardboard. It looks like a real work of art from an art gallery.

We ended up making our own individual paintings with black and red string and will use these for another idea which our teachers have thought of.

We continued the idea of including animals into our activities today and used them with stamp pads. We had small stamp pads in purple, pink, blue and red and put the rubber stamps onto them and then stamped them on our paper. These pictures are in our bags so we can keep them at home. Many of our art works are put inside our Portfolios which will be a gift for our parents at the end of the year. We also keep some work inside an art folder in our classrooms which our teachers empty after a month or so.

We sang a song about copying called “Can you copy me?” Every time Shelley did an action, we tried to copy her. We blinked our eyes, folded our arms, nodded our heads, swayed our bodies, popped our lips (Sophie said that this was just like a fish) and we tapped our knees. Darren read us stories while we were on the mat in the earlier part of the day. Shoko arrived at school and went to look for her favourite book at the moment which is “The Kissing Hand”. She said that she has the same story at home.

Shoko made a heart for Nico’s birthday as we are getting ready with our wishes for him, well in advance. We took good care of our flowers in the park today and spent time going to fill our containers up with water; then watering the plants; then filling them up again etc. We had so much fun and we love that we have our very own garden in the park. We think that soon we will be planting new flowers so that they can be ready for springtime.

Love Shelley, Kana, and Darren