Spring Term 2012

To all parents children and staff from the Good Shepherd, we want to keep you posted on the activities we are doing at Kite Studios with the children when they come to work with us in the Art studio. Last term was very rewarding as we worked closely with teachers from nursery to year 2 to re-enforce aspects of the ciruclum especially in language in the context of story telling. We focused on vowels and the 'magic e', letter recognition, formation and spelling . During each lesson we have recorded the results with photographs and notes to bring together for the blog.

The theme of' all about me for year 1 ' inspired us to spend some time on introducing ourselves with good eye contact and lots of smiles, something that became very important in our story when the puppet protagonist introduces him/her self to the vowel owl! The children began by imagining they were puppets going on a walk in a forest, but first they became tiny compact seeds on the ground that wit the help of sunlight and water grew into tall trees ( they all tried the tree pose from yoga!) , but one seed turned into a puppet not a tree. Each child identified with the puppet and first made a drawing of how they wanted it to look and after making the puppet they made a drawing from observation of how it actually looked. The puppet making involved watching the techniques and then working in pairs to help each other with the various stages such as twisting the fabric for the head.




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In the second session we developed the story about the puppet in the landscape of the magical forest with the vowel owl, the children had access to all kinds of materials from real bay leaves which they picked off branches and then scrunched to smell the aroma, before drawing them from observation. They used ink to draw with , dipping their fingers into it to remember the vowel 'i' for ink and to feel the freedom of drawing in a way that they couldn't worry about mistakes.
Clay was used for the ground of the forest and the owl vowel , so by the end of the second session they had all had a go at painting, drawing , cutting, modelling in clay, sticking and turning card into a tube for a plinth to exhbit their landscpes on.