Our Friendship Sculptures

Here are some lovely examples of our completed Friendship Week sculptures. We each used newspaper and modrock to create little models of ourselves in various poses. Once they had dried, we wrote kind messages of friendship on the models of the friends in our class. Now we each have a model covered in lovely words about ourselves- to remind us of how marvellous our friends think we are!

Around Our Classroom This Week!

Christmas has arrived in St. Clare's! Take a look around our classroom this week:

This week, we also made our own silver donkeys, after reading to the end of our fantastic class novel 'The Silver Donkey'.

The Fire Children

Source: Amazon.co.uk

As we continue to learn about Togo, we have enjoyed a West African story this week. We all enjoyed the simple and positive story of 'The Fire Children' and we particularly loved the beautiful illustrations.

We read about how the sky god Nyame hung a basket in the sky, which he filled with earth and nature and animals. Then he made a trapdoor and holes in the sky to let the light through.

We drew what we imagined this would look like:

Then, we learned about fronted adverbials and how they can be added to the beginning of a sentence to make our writing more interesting. Here are some great examples of using fronted adverbials to write interesting sentences about 'The Fire Children':

Yesterday afternoon, we made our own Fire Children from clay.
Here we are making our sculptures:

 Here are the finished masterpieces:

Our Aliens!

On Friday, St. George's Class were set the challenge of creating a 3D sculpture of an alien. They could choose an alien from Doctor Who, or create one of their own! Firstly, in teams, they drew their designs and labelled the diagrams with the materials they would need. Then, I opened my 'shop' and each group had to negotiate for the materials they needed, then get to work! Here are the fantastic final alien sculptures: 

Well done everyone! Have a wonderful safe half term!

A Fantastic Trip!

At the end of September we spent a wonderful day at Dulwich Picture Gallery. We enjoyed a morning in the gallery, being guided by some very interesting teachers. We spent some time looking at a selection of the paintings in the gallery and learned the stories behind the pictures.

In the afternoon, we had the opportunity to make some art of our own. We looked at an incredible seascape by Ludolf Bakhuizen from 1696. After discussing the picture and looking particularly at the people featured, we began to make our own artwork.

We were lucky to have the opportunity to make a 3D project each; creating a wonderful boat. The first step was to cut out the template of the boat's hull.

Next, we folded it into shape and made a bench to keep the structure steady: 

To make the boat eye catching, we covered it with a collage of printed paper (including some maps, stamps and fantastic patterned wrapping paper):

After that, we used the patterned paper to build a sail, wrapping it around a wooden stick for the mast, then we added a flag to the top. We used a ball of clay under the bench to hold the mast in place.

Once the sails were attached and the flags were flying, we used wire and more patterned paper to add bunting to the boats. The final step was to choose a name for the completed boats.

To end our workshop, our teacher asked us to think of a memorable journey we had taken. Some of us thought of holidays, some remembered visiting friends or family and some children even remembered their journey on their first day of school! We wrote these memories on tags and attached them to our boats. 

Here are some finished boats, we're very proud of them- aren't they wonderful?!