Artists at work

Today was the first day of “Ohana Artists” and we had fun, messy, painting activities to start off our week of creativity. On our large table, we had a really large piece of paper which was recycled from a delivery. Our teachers joined the pieces of paper together and this is the background for a five day work in progress, project. Today, we used rollers, large foam brushes, some paddle pop sticks and real large paint brushes and put the background colour on the paper. We used green, red and blue which were all mixed with white. The colours are therefore more pastel in shade. We loved painting and getting paint all over our hands as well as immersing ourselves fully in the sensory experience. At the second activity table we had a selection of green, red and blue candles. These were our drawing utensils today. We drew on a white piece of paper, and couldn’t see what we had drawn so well. However when we took the dye, and painted over the wax candle, we could see the actual shapes that we had made. The dye didn’t cover the shapes that we drew, but rather, covered the paper, where we hadn’t drawn anything. The dye that we used to paint with was made from water and food colouring. Our day actually was a little back to front. Our teachers were worried about the weather because we missed going to the park last week, when it was raining. They didn’t want this to happen again , so we went to the park early, had our snack there and played and then came back to our classroom to do activities. We took our bottles and snack to the park and sat underneath the trees, sitting on the picnic mats, eating our snack. We busied ourselves playing with sand and water and we had a fantastic arrangement. Liam and Karl were the water carriers and they kept bringing us water so that we could build and fill our buckets and be engaged in imaginative play in the shade. Many of us had our Ohana International School hats on. In fact eight of us wore our hats today.

Our circle time, was an experiment with colours and ice trays. We are preparing for ice painting which we are planning to do on Thursday. We first looked at water in a transparent jug and Shelley asked us if we knew what colour it was. Vincent said that it was white while Zachary said that it was grey. We then poured the water into the ice tray and we still said that it was white and grey which our teachers never disputed. We put little coloured matchsticks into the water so that we can hold the ice when we paint with it and then we dropped red, blue, green and yellow powder into each one. We made red water, blue water, green water and purple water. We even made orange water. Sayaka took the ice tray to the freezer upstairs and we will wait to see what happens to it. Our story was called “Alice’s Art Class” and it was about a little girl called Alice who loved her art class with Miss. Marvin her teacher. Miss Marvin always told the children what to do, what colour to use, how to paint etc however Alice liked to make her own choices. When Miss Marvin told them to paint the crocodile green, Alice chose to paint it red and when she painted a picture of Miss Marvin, she made it multi-coloured. Michaela brought the book to school as it is her book.

We are looking forward to seeing what we are going to do on the large work in progress tomorrow. We heard our teachers talking about hands and feet and also, something about shapes. We want to wish Allie a very happy birthday as it is her birthday today. Happy birthday Allie! Love always Shelley, Hisami, Nanako and Sayaka