Art with Jacinta

The Prep students had lots of enjoyment in creating paintings using Nature Paintbrushes. Jacinta collected some plants from her garden at home, including pine tree branches, pieces of lavender, gingko tree leaves, ferns, bunny ear plant leaves, succulents and flowers.  This activity allowed the students to explore their creativity and imagination freely. Exploring the patterns and textures that the Nature’s Paint Brushes transferred onto the paper. Mixing coloured paint together and creating shapes and pictures with no restriction or expectations. The learning outcomes and benefits of this activity:  Self expression with paint Eye and hand coordination Fine motor development Experimenting and exploring with a new paint tool Sense of achievement and pride Experimenting with textures and shapes Discussing predictions Colour recognition

With Summer just around the corner, the Preps have been exploring sunflowers in their weekly Art lessons. We started off this Sunflower Unit by looking at some real sunflowers. Since last Term some students in Grade 3 have been growing some sunflowers from seeds, especially for the Preps! After we had a gallery walk around the art room to view our peers sunflower artworks we had a group discussion about how amazing it is that everyone's sunflowers look different, even though we were all sketching the same sunflowers. We admired, looked, smelled, touched and sketched these beautiful sunflowers. Some of the students were surprised at how HUGE the sunflowers were! We also studied Vincent Van Gogh's famous Sunflower pieces for inspiration for our own Sunflower artworks. Van Gogh's Sunflowers

To celebrate the start of Spring the Preps have been looking at the beautiful Cherry Blossom Tree.  We recycled the pages from an old Encyclopedia book to create a collage background for our artwork. The Preps focused on careful glueing and covering up all the white areas on the page.  We left our collage artworks to dry for a week (the Preps are getting very good at putting their artwork on the drying rack all by themselves!) The following week we painted the blossom tree trunk, branches and sticks. And the final step that we did to complete our artwork was the pink cherry blossom flowers, which we used the bottom of plastic water bottles to create these prints. The Prep artists were all very proud of their finished masterpieces!  During this unit, we had lots of discussions about what rubbish items we can recycle and reuse at home to create new artworks; items included old books, magazines, newspapers, jars, lids, containers, bottles... the list goes on.  ...

This week is Art the Preps had lots of (messy) fun experimenting with stamping and printing of lemons and carrots. The was an open ended experimental Art lesson in which the art was all about experiencing and enjoying the process and learning from it rather than working towards a certain end product.