Summative assessment - Nature Painting

Central idea: Learning about colours helps build awareness of them in nature

During the summative week, the children worked on creating their nature painting. This project allows the children to show their understanding of the central idea and the way they are interpreting and representing it through colours. 

During the planning stage, the children identified something from nature that they want to represent. The primary colours, black and white are the only colours that the children were given. While creating their painting, the children mixed the paint to create their desired colour and added white to lighten the colour and black to darken it. 

The painting can be taken home at anytime! A short description will be placed on the back of the canvas. 

Grace "A Christmas tree surrounded by angels"

Jacob "A tree"

Janet "Green grass and blue sky"

Kesler "A tree"

Luca "A yellow flower"

Alexia "A pink flower"

Andrea "A purple flower"

Angela "A purple flower"

Esme "A Christmas tree"

Enjoy, 

Anamaria

Hanging decorations

With the holidays approaching, we decided to make nature print decorations. We collected leaves, branches, rocks, chestnuts and other nature objects from the forest to create nature print ornaments. 

The children picked different leaves and used a roller to imprint them onto their piece of clay.  

Picking and mixing colours to paint their ornaments once they dried was a very easy task. Using their knowledge, the children created tint colours to paint the top part and shades to paint the edge. The children noticed that by painting the edge darker, the colour on top stands out. 

Happy Holidays, 

Anamaria and the Wind Group!

Art on Fridays - Finger painting

For Art today, the children used their fingers to paint trees. Finger painting allows the children to express themselves freely and promotes a sensory experience.

Angela "Lots of apples in an apple tree on a beautiful blue sky day."

Janet "A small tree and the sun set"

Kesler "My trees are apple trees. Apple trees on a rainy day."

Luca " A tree standing tall while the sun is setting."

Enjoy,
Anamaria

Art on Fridays - Changes in nature

The story "Sky Tree" by Thomas Locker is about a turtle that lays eggs beneath a tree. The pictures in the story are painted by the author, and as Grace remarked, "the painting of the tree and the different seasons seem real". Each day, the tree changes and so does the sky behind it. The beautiful thing about this tree is that the changes represent the passage of time in nature. For art today, we used watercolours to create the sky. The children chose to use the following techniques: wet on wet, dry brush and graded wash. The children noticed that in some scenes, the colour lightens towards the bottom of the page. Graded was is the technique that helps create that look. The brush needs to be loaded with clean water and the strokes need to be more gentle towards the bottom. 

Next week, the children will each paint a tree and write a poem about the season they picked and what their paintings expresses. 

Modelling clay to make flowers - representing nature through visual art.

Flowers can be made of different materials and different colours. The children identified flowers as being part of nature and through their presence in nature, our world looks more beautiful and colourful. 

While working with clay, we experienced that the clay is cold to touch and also very easy to mold. The children each chose the number of petals and the shape they want for their flowers. Very meticulously, they each worked very hard to create a unique and special flower. 

The flowers will be painted with acrylic paint and covered with a coat of varnish. 

The children will show an understanding of colours and mixing when choosing their paint for their flower. 

Ocean scenes using chalk pastels and white paint

Each Friday, the children in the wind group experience a different art technique. Today we used chalk pastels and white paint to create an ocean scene. There are two important steps when using chalk pastels and white paint. The first step is to draw the desired scene with chalk and the second step is to dip a finger in white paint and to spread it over the chalk. The friction, between the paint and chalk, enables the colour to spread and creates a smooth surface. 

Once the ocean scene dried, the children used black construction paper to rip or cut out some silhouettes. Some children chose to have a boat in their art, while others picked different animals and sea creatures.

Primary and secondary colours assessment

In order to assess the children's knowledge on colour, we made our own play dough. One by one, the children shared their knowledge on colour and chose to create their own mixture for their play dough. 

The conversations and facial expressions showed their knowledge, joy and playfulness when it comes to mixing colours.

A child's inquiry led to this activity

Esme "Can we create tints and shades only from primary colours?" 

In most situations, doing the work and experiencing new discoveries is a better learning experience than just discussing it. In order to answer Esme's question, I gave the children the opportunity to explore with paint. The children each had primary and secondary colours, as well as white and black paint. On a palette, the children freely mixed and created different colours, tints and shades. While exploring this process, Esme answered her own question. "I am adding white to purple and it's turning lighter. I am creating a tint." 

Esme "We can create tints and shades to all the colours in the world." 

The children painted with the colours they mixed and they are very eager to take their art home and share it with their family.

Experiencing Winslow Homer's style - Watercolours

On Friday, we explored the works of Winslow Homer, an artist that was a master of outdoor painting scenes. Homer was one of the first artists to create watercolour paintings. He used watercolour for perspective, and this style is used to create the feeling that some things in the picture look far away while other things looked closer. 

The children experimented the technique of wet-on-wet watercolour, painting the land, trees, a mountain lake and the sky.

Colours in nature - Hue, Tint and Shade

During our nature walk, the children picked various items in nature to explore and observe. Out of those materials, we picked a couple of leaves to look at. The children noticed that the leaves are yellow, but while describing them in detail, they labelled the colours as following: "brownish yellow", "darker yellow", "lighter yellow", "bright like the sunshine yellow". 

The project we are working on right now is to create the colours that we see on our leaves. We used yellow as the root colour and we added white to create tints and black to create shades. The children noticed that we could alter the colours by adding more or less white/black to the hue colour (root colour - in our case yellow).

Esme "If you put too much black, then it will actually turn our colour into black and we can't see the yellow anymore." 

Grace "The more white we add, the lighter it becomes." 

Luca "I would like to add more black to my mixture to make it darker."

Art on Fridays - Abstract Art

During group time on Friday we looked at paintings and art projects and the children described what they were seeing in the different pictures. Some paintings represented a replica of different objects or nature scenes and it was very easy to describe what it was, compared to some art work that required a second look at it, a deeper and more thoughtful approach. That kind of art is called Abstract Art. The main characteristic of abstract art is that it has no recognizable object. Some abstract artists use colours, shapes and different objects to capture their emotions and subconscious thoughts. 

The children used different materials to create abstract art. Although all the children had access to the same materials, each work of art looks very unique and has it's own little story behind it. 

Colours in nature

Brown trees. "with a little bit of black" - Angela

The children in the wind group know the primary colours and explored mixing and creating different colours in the last few days. Fusing that knowledge about colour with what they know about nature, we will expand our inquiry and discuss/explore the different colours we find in nature.

"Green leaves" - Kesler

"A gray rock" - Grace 

As an assessment, after collecting some natural elements from outdoors, we will challenge our expertise in creating new colours by mixing primary colours to create secondary ones. The task will be to mix the primary colours together and add white and black to create the colours of nature that the children bring in from outside. 

"What do you think Angela? What colour is this leaf?"