The Poinsettia Story

Print: Sponge printing

I always love reading the story of the Poinsettia to my class at Christmas. Last year a TP student used Print as a response to the story. I recreated it again this year- it was just so effective! :) 

Cut sponges to shape and use cotton buds to print the small yellow buds. 

Christmas Tag!

Thank you to Ms Forde's Classroom for the tag! :) What a fun idea!
http://msfordesclassroom.blogspot.ie/2015/12/christmas-tag.html

1. What's your favourite Christmas movie? It has to be 'Elf', never gets old!

2. Do you open your presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? Presents have to be hidden on me...I have no self restraint, I WILL PEEK! So to answer the question, until I am given them!

3. Do you have a favourite Christmas memory? Lots, but the most recent has to be my eldest brother's 40th birthday, December 2012. We lost a family member (brother in law) after so it always holds a very special place in our hearts, it was the last time we were all together and it was a brilliant night.

4. Favourite festive food? Chocolate...All the chocolate!

5. Favourite Christmas gift? So hard to choose- I love when someone surprises you by picking that random thing that you had in mind and you wonder 'how did they know?'.

6. Favourite Christmas scent? That mulled wine smell... ;)

7. Do you have any Christmas Eve traditions? They are changing with each year, we used to all go out on Christmas Eve, but I have 6 nieces and nephews so we tend to go for dinner now. This year I am going to England to my sister for Christmas so that'll be new again!

8. What tops your tree? A red star. My parent's tree has a porcelain angel that I just adored as a child.

9. As a kid, what was the one gift you asked for but never received? Baby Newborn. My friend Susan got one, I went to her house every day and played with it!! :D

10. What's the best part about Christmas for you? Having family together, it just doesn't happen at any other time of the year.

Merry Christmas, and a healthy, Happy New Year!

Colour Mixing with Paint

Using oranges, we mixed colours to find the closest shades as possible. There were great discussions as to whether to add white or yellow to the orange. 

We then drew the outline of our oranges with chalk pastels. Sometimes you can still see pencil lines through the paint, chalk is a way around this!

They turned out really well!! Fair play to them! :)

Kandinsky, Emotions, Colours and Shapes

http://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/color-study-squares-with-concentric-circles-1913

http://www.deepspacesparkle.com/2013/11/14/kandinsky-and-the-rainbow-art-project/

I found this really interesting lesson on Deep Space Sparkle

"Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings use color to show emotions rather than painting an object to look real. This concept is particularly intriguing to young children as they generally strive to make all their drawings look as real as possible. Introducing young children to Kandinsky’s abstract artwork encourages them to see that art is created many ways."

It is approached on this blog as a fabric and fibre lesson, but I think it would also work really well as a paint or pastels lesson.

Children find circles very difficult to cut out- so great for fine motor skills also.

I'd like to do this lesson when I'm covering 2D shapes in maths, it would be a fantastic group work project- a table for triangles/ squares/ circles etc and creating the different shapes.

Also- in my MA course, one of my colleagues created colour studies using circles like this. They were amazing. She looked at flowers and them picked the colours in the flowers and arranged them in Kandinsky like circles. This would be a fantastic way of looking at the colours and colour mixing in older years.