Boost 2 - Term 3 Week 3

After the success of the recent chess tournament, we are sticking with the chess theme and making our own chess sets.  The boys are all very excited about this and there was lots of noise and chatter when deciding which theme they would go with.  Once they decided on a theme we talked about the characteristics of each chess piece.  For example the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board.  She can move fast from one end of the board to the other and she is tall, so when we choose a character for our Queen piece, they need to have the same characteristics as the original piece.  There is a lot of critical thinking going into justifying the reasons for their choices and the boys are learning that they can't just choose any old character, it has to be relevant to the chess piece characteristics.  So far we have a dinosaur set (herbivores against carnivores), a Star Wars set (classic black versus white), a transformers set (autobots against deceptions) and a minecraft set (monsters versus players). 

Today we started on our chess boards - the boys learned how to change the board around to ensure that they kept their lines nice and neat.  We also started making a prototype of a chess piece each to check for correct sizing on the board.  We will continue with the boards next session and begin modelling our pieces as well.

Boost 1 - Term 3 Week 3

Welcome back to term 3.  Our whole school has been learning about different aspects of change.  Change in science, change in art and colours, change over time. 

This term we are looking at change in the form of perspectives.  The fact that different people can react totally differently to exactly the same event is a big concept, and one that I believe is vitally important to know.  Supporting this concept is the fact that we can alter or change our own perspective on the same thing over time.

Last session, we looked at two different artists, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso.  Monet painted in the impressionist style and Picasso painted in the cubism style.

Important facts about how these artists viewed change:

Monet – often painted the same thing over and over at different times of the day.  He was fascinated with the changing light and this is reflected in his may different paintings of the same subject.

Picasso – painted many self portraits, each one different to the other.  These portrayed Picasso's differing moods and thoughts at the time of painting each one.

There is also change in how they perceived the world and represented it in their paintings.  Monet and Picasso both painted portraits of women, for example, but their paintings are extremely different to each other.  

We started last session by making our own simple artwork by following exactly the same instructions.  The children worked independently and listened to a set of instructions, to complete their abstract artwork.  At the end of the task the children compared their artwork which was all very different.  This is because each individual put their own perspective into their work.

We have seen that different people have different perspectives on things, and now we are learning that we can also change our perspective of something.  Each child decided on something to draw, and we are now replicating that drawing but using changing art techniques.  We have an initial sketch, a piece where the children were only allowed to use straight lines, a pointillism piece (using only dots and primary colours), and a piece where they were able to use any colours but the correct ones.  We are starting to see that the same picture can change dramatically depending on what technique we use on it. 

Today we continued with the different techniques on the same piece of art work.  We drew an abstract design, then divided the paper into four, and the children are using a different technique on each quarter of their artwork.