Blu project

Premessa

Our project began with the children of 3a and 3b curating a school gallery for this year’s Big Vote. Each year in school we have a Big Vote event where all the children, staff and visitors of the school are invited to vote for their favourite piece of art work displayed in the school buildings.

Metodologia

We use The Visual Thinking Strategies to encourage all pupils to question and comment on each work of art.

Next came our “Blue” challenge. We began by recalling primary, secondary and tertiary colours. The children made their own colour wheel eye by mixing tints and shades and inventing new colour names, to match each segment of the colour wheel eye.

The children then engaged in a month of multi subject Blue activities. We began by asking the question: “What is Blue to you?” We looked at work by Pablo Picasso during his Blue Period as a starting point for our poetry-writing unit, which focused on emotions and the five senses. We brainstormed the word Blue, with some interesting and insightful results. Our questioning took us on a musical journey, first listening to songs that contained the word “blue” and then on to an analysis of what the artist wanted to portray by the use of

“blue”.

 We also took a scientific look at the word “Blue”, by asking the question: “Is water blue?”

We experimented with Brusho inks and the children discovered new blues for our palette including Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue and OST Blue. We then surveyed the year group to find the most popular choice. We combined the results with our maths programme on fractions, by recording our survey results in a Mondrian style grid painting.

The final part of our project was to bring all the strands together in a final piece of artwork. The children used wax and ink resist to create a seascape background. They combined the blues from the Brusho ink palette to create their own unique wash. Next they created an embossed colored metal fish from which they could take a rubbing and also a pen and ink fish to inhabit their seascape.

To make their project really come to life the children then took a photograph of both the fish and the seascape. They combined the two pieces using the

Apps Sketch Book and Sketch Book Motion to produce an animated

 “Fish Motion”.

Nodi tematici

To support our project the Yr 3 Italian teacher Annalisa Sartor and Digital Learning Coach Ruggero Cortese worked with the children looking at the life and history of Peggy Guggenheim. To bring this unit to life each child designed and made a pair of Guggenheim glasses using the digital printer.

The children were very excited to wear their glasses on the visit to the museum.