Squirrels News – 13th May 2022

Our artist of the week this week is Van Gogh. We have been learning all about his life and enjoyed looking at some of his most famous paintings such as ‘Starry Night’. We spoke about the types of objects he includes in his work and noticed that he enjoyed painting landscapes and included lots of flowers in his work.

We drew inspiration from his piece ‘Sunflowers’ in our Art activity by creating our own still life paintings of a bouquet of red and purple tulips. To create these pieces the children used materials they had not encountered at school before such as acrylics and canvas.

We discussed the texture of the canvas and why it had been chosen for this piece instead if other materials such as paper explaining that it was thicker and would add a different texture to our work. We also observed and discussed the difference between our normal paint and the acrylic paint.

The children spent a great deal of time observing the flowers in front of them, trying to capture every detail in their still life paintings. We also created wonderful tie dye t-shirts and hats this week to wear when we welcome our parents to our art exhibition in a few weeks’ time. The children had great fun using the dye to create their wonderful clothing and can’t wait to be able to wear them at the exhibition

In other areas of our learning, we have been focusing on developing our addition skills and we have been continuing to improve our letter formation by writing captions to go alongside our sculptures.

Our Artists Role Play area continues to be a big hit as the children explore collage, chalk, charcoal and paint. We also used loose parts around the classroom to create wonderful pieces of transient art using objects and created some other still life setups for the children to draw from.

Outside we developed our gross motor skills by playing with the hoops, and the balance beams. On our Outdoor Learning Day we continued to focus on Andy Goldsworthy and created another piece of natural art. This time however we gave the children a challenge: they were not allowed to create the piece on grass and they had to try and incorporate different elements from the original piece the previous week. There were some amazing creations made and we were so impressed with the Squirrels creativity and enthusiasm for taking on a new challenge!