Orcas Japan inspired Creativity Week
As part of this year’s Brookside Creativity week, Orcas class was very busy and very creative! We were inspired by Japan, learnt lots about their culture, and completed lots of amazing pieces of artwork. On Monday, we started our week researching to find out all about the country of Japan. The children took what they had found out and created a poster in small groups. The children all worked brilliantly as a team and produced informative and creative posters.
We then created some beautiful pieces of artwork inspired by the cherry blossom in Japan. We used water colours to create the background and painted out cherry blossom branches on top. After this we started another piece of work inspired by ‘The Great Wave’ by Hokusai. For this piece we used pencils and oil pastels to add vibrant colours.
We also had a go at some origami making paper fish and frogs. We also used paper folding to make patterned fans and we created Japanese inspired pictures by dripping paint on to salt.
Finally, we looked at Japanese wooden prints and then made our own inspired by the animals and nature which feature in the artwork. We also learnt some numbers in Japanese and wrote them out to create our own scrolls.
We had an amazing week learning more about different cultures and styles of artwork.
Olympics Week
As this year there will be another Summer Olympic games in Paris, last week, Orcas class learnt all about the history of the Olympics. We researched the origins in Ancient Greek times and learnt about how it was reinstated and adapted in recent years. We watched clips from the London 2012 Olympic Summer games and the children worked in groups to design (and perform) parts of their own dream Olympic Opening Ceremony.
We were visited by Dan the Skipping Man and it inspired a new craze with several of the class buying their own skipping ropes.
We also watched old clips of different Olympic sports; we found the rock-climbing racing particularly impressive. These clips inspired our own mini-Olympics where we competed in racing using the climbing wall and practising our archery skills.
The children seem fascinated and seemed eager to watch more of the events this coming Summer.
