This week we began our Artists topic where the children will explore the works of different artists. We are going to use this topic as an opportunity to learn about different art techniques and then we are going to try and adapt these techniques to make our own creations!
This week we our focus was on the work of Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama who enjoys exploring polka dots and works primarily with sculpture. We learned about what sculpture is and looked at different examples of sculptures, made from a variety of different materials.
We took inspiration from her work by deciding to make our own sculptures. We began by collecting different sized and shaped sticks which the children then covered in papier-mâché. Once the papier-mâché was dry, we painted our sculptures different colours and then added white dot stickers to create a polka dot effect.
This Art activity encouraged the children to explore a new technique of creating artwork and engage with messy and sensory activities. This also supported the children to refine their gross and fine motor skills through shaping the sculpture and adding the small dots. The children were fully engaged in this art activity, and it was lovely to see their natural interest towards new things. During the week the children had the opportunity to engage with lots more more exciting activities. Our Role Play area was set up as an Art Gallery and the children loved using the space to look at pictures of different artists and their artworks and to experiment with making their own sculptures out of recyclable materials.
They also explored colour and patterns by creating patterns with our sequencing bears, creating some lovely transient art using loose parts and building amazing models with Lego. The children used lots of creativity and imagination this week and it was lovely to observe them sharing and discussing their ideas with each other.
The children continued to develop their fine motor skills through play by using pipettes to transfer coloured water from one bottle to another and washing off the chalk marks on the outdoor blackboard with spray bottles. Both activities supported the strengthening of their hand muscles whilst having fun and developing their imagination! On our Outdoor Learning Day we continued looking at different ways of creating art and exploring new techniques using natural objects. The children had a lot of fun creating natural paintbrushes out of sticks, leaves, grass and flowers and exploring the different marks they could create with them. This term the children will be exploring story building activities. We have introduced this because of the interest the children have showed in story books and creating their own stories with puppets and story spoons.
During one of our Focused Time activities, we thought about and discussed what voting was. The children were then able vote on the type of story building they would like to use to create their own stories. In our discussions, the children independently drew links between our discussion of the election that had taken place and the voting we carried out and it was lovely to see how they discussed their understanding of how voting works and why we vote. This also linked back to our learning of the British Values of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
The Blue Fledglings voted to create a puppet theatre to build their story whilst the Red Fledglings voted to ‘Cut and Tell’ which included cutting out pictures from newspapers and incorporating them into their story. We then returned as a group to discuss what materials we needed to create our puppets which encouraged the children to reflect and list ideas.
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