Fantastic Pop Art Pictures

Thursday is a really busy day in our class downstairs and while we had lots of children, we still missed our friends Lucinda, Tomas and William who are not well. Get better soon all of our friends! We are in the process of doing preparations for Chinese New Year which is next Friday 31^st January. We tore up red paper into small pieces which we will use for a collage as red is the most important colour for Chinese New Year, together with gold. In fact, the Chinese flag is red with some small yellow stars and a big yellow star. We also crumpled red tissue paper which we will use as well. We are not sure what we will use for the gold.

 We used calligraphy brushes today and made vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved designs. Our teachers will cut them out and create ‘Kanji’ in our workbooks as part of our New Year activities. We did lots of cutting today with the recycled curved colours of the rainbow that we made last term. We snipped and snipped and made lots of small pieces of paper; we are developing our fine motor skills so that one day we can cut carefully on a line and make a shape.

We sat and sang together in a circle and Hisami hid twelve pictures of different animals. These animals actually all correspond to the years in the Chinese Zodiac. We had a dog, rooster, sheep, tiger, dragon, snake, cow, boar, monkey, rabbit, horse and a mouse. She had to make all the noises that are related to these animals so that we could guess what animals they were. Once we had guessed, she showed us the pictures of them. We love animal songs and pictures and learning about them. We had a great time in the park and then for the first time, we had story time outside the shrine that is opposite the nature reserve.

Upstairs we had the nail boards ands many of us made pictures on it, using rubber bands in many colours. We stretch the rubber bands over the nails and can make a variety of shapes, designs and actual pictures. Abiya and Yossi had their turn working on the graphics tablet. They recreated their photos and made them have really bright colours. They then made them into “Pop Art” style photos as seen here below.

Beckett and Clodia spent part of the morning making “sculptures” out of junk art. After snack time, we had our fire and earthquake drill. For some of us this was our first time and we were all really careful as we came down the stairs instead of using the elevator. In the park, we spent time developing our upper body’s using the bars. We hung from them and dangled our legs in the air pretending that we were running.

During circle time we sang “Open them, shut them” together with our regular morning singing. We re-read “Harold and the purple crayon” and then our teachers asked us: “What would you draw that you would like to become real?” Tokutaro said he would like to draw a flower, Ava said she would like to draw her friends and Beckett said that he would like to draw a house. When we were looking at a “Pop Art” picture, our teachers asked us if we knew what was written on the picture. Ava and Tokutaro both read the words which said “Pop Art”. As part of an activity at the table (connected to “Pop Art”) our teachers asked us to choose a shape e. g. a diamond, square, circle, heart, triangle, rectangle etc. We then drew the outline of the shape that we had selected in the middle of a piece of paper and our task was to fill it in. We used cotton buds and made dots inside the shape and then outside the shape in another colour. Learning about different styles of art is a whole lot of fun.

Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna