A Week of Art 2011

Arts Week- Day 1

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

 This past Monday through Thursday was Arts Week. Jo Fenney who is the teacher in the other year 4 class headed up this week of art activities, but she let me plan what I did with my group of 17 students. I got to lead the GNT's (gifted and talented) artists for the week which consisted of kids from years, 3, 4, 5, 6. One of the special things that they got to do was go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park outside of Wakefield. Apparently this was one of Europe's leading open-air galleries, but this would have been much more evident without the extreme wind gusts and sideways rain... None the less, the kids did amazing with not complaining after I made a challenge for them to not say anything about how cold it was. We spent time walking through the park and sitting and sketching some of the sculptures. I noticed a them of rabbits in the sculptures, which I thought was a little odd. We didn't have a strict schedule we just wandered around drawing things and it was really successful that way.
Helen (Miss Leyland) drove the mini-bus this day to our place in the wind and she did really good and it was fun to be with her. I haven't spent much time with her during school time and she was BRILL!

Callum (a future photographer) took this picture through one of the sculptures!

So sun came out for Tasneem

All of the GNTers: Turki, Anees, Zeeshan, Remesha, Hafsah, Tahleel, Callum, Nafisa, Manihel,  Ayesha, Aliyah, Tasneem, Shumrez, Hamza,  and Umira

 Day 2 & 3

*graphite sketches of leaves with different shading techniques

* watercolor paintings of animal in natural habitat

* leaf printmaking

* white conte crayons on black paper

* gold scratch art of flowers

*group project of acrylic on canvases (Nature)

* paper mosaic trees

* poem about nature on leaf

* weaving string through copper wire

*leaf outlines oil pastels rubbings

 Our main focus in this group was making a portfolio of many different art techniques all used to depict nature. We started off doing detailed graphite sketches of leaves that we collected. They then lined up the sketches with an acetate sheet and went over the outline with permanent markers and finished up by shading the acetate sheet with either cross hatches, pointillism or contour lines.
Our next project was doing scratch art of flowers. So they used scrapers to scrape off a black covering to reveal a gold color. This required a bit of skill and precision and I soon realized that these gifted kids that we older were much better at this than the normal enrichments that I teach! We then took leaves and laid them down on the paper and used oil pastels to go around the edges and smudge to create the outline of leaves. It was a fun filler project while others were finishing other things. Next we did our big collaborative project where we painted an abstract acrylic painting to show nature. This group project was a challenge, especially knowing when to stop...

We used the already messy room to do our leaf prints on fancy paper, which was really similar to printmaking.
Day 3 started out doing watercolor paintings of an animal in their nature habitat. I was really impressed with the creativity that they used to come up with their animal. After their paintings they moved on to making paper mosaic trees. They ripped paper into to small pieces and re-glued it down to make a tree.
We did a reverse shading technique and put white and gray conte crayons on black paper. The kids had to think in reverse and that was a challenge, but I thought they did a brilliant job.
I also had the kids write a poem of their choice to write within a leaf to also put in their books. The hardest thing that I had the kids do was probably the weaving, although many of the kids LOVED doing this. The each had a square of copper wire and many different kinds of fibers and stings to weave in it. Some really grasped onto this and really surprised me; others struggled...

One of the watercolor paintings: a polar bear 

Day 4:

Assembled our portfolios

We put all of the activities that we did into a portfolio and the kids got to decorate the covers. On Thursday, we had representatives from the group show the rest of the school in an assembly what we did during the week.

Abby found a smile somewhere...or a grimace

I really enjoyed this week. It was hard and very tiring, but rewarded in the end. These kids don't have a regular art class, so art week is different than normal days. All day of every day is filled with art! Kind of like my university years... The week was a little unstructured, but it was nice to be able to go with the flow with this mixture of ages of kids. Well worth the time!

Absolutely exhausted after art week. Everyone was so pooped! Laying on a table
sounded like the best option at the time...