Art, Music and French

As-tu un animal?

Our French topic this term has helped us to learn the names of a variety of pets. We have recapped using un/une with masculine and feminine nouns and have learned the stem phrases j'ai (I have), je n'ai pas de (I do not have) and qui s'appelle (who is called). 

Listen to the clips below. Can you work out which pets each person does/does not have?

This half term we are analysing, evaluating and responding to art in different ways. Today we looked at the painting Children's Games by Pieter Bruegel (1560). We took time to spot hidden details in the picture, played a searching game to find different elements and discussed different aspects of the picture with our partners. We generated questions about the artwork and read information to answer some of them. 

In our English work, we considered games that we have today and worked as a group to write a short guide on how to play them. Later on, we identified elements of the painting that we enjoyed and worked in groups to recreate them outside. We took turns to photograph, evaluate and edit our pictures before sending them to Mrs Holliday to become part of our own Children's Games collage.

Take a look at our photos below - can you spot which parts of the original painting we are trying to represent?

Our cross-curricular art activity helped us to make links between our learning. We studied pictures from our history topic and used viewfinders to select interesting lines and shapes. We drew a 10cm square accurately using a ruler and traced an interesting section of our picture. We then used reflection to create an artwork with vertical and horizontal symmetry. As a challenge, we then coloured our pictures and tried to keep the colours symmetrical too.

Today we explored using natural and everyday objects to make impressions in play dough. We experimented with different textures and lines by pressing, rolling and piercing. We then made our final designs and used ink to print them. We had some challenges because our warm hands caused the oil to cause problems with our water-based ink but we persevered! 

Every Thursday, Mr Haythornthwaite comes in to teach us music. We are learning to play the ukulele as well as learning music theory and how to read and compose using the musical stave.

This unit began with us working together on a large scale, practising our techniques with sketching pencils and charcoal. We worked with different lines, shades and patterns to represent feelings, emotions and events. Once we had shared and evaluated these, we used our learning to imagine a scene from the Jabberwocky, eventually moving on to designing our own mythical creatures using wax resist techniques.