Autumn Term

Kingfisher Class made really personal and eye-catching art all about themselves. This art was inspired by the front cover of the book 'Wonder' by RJ Palacio, which is our class text for the first few weeks of term. See if you can spot what is special or important to some of our children. 

Kingfishers have started learning about space. We were introduced to the planets in our solar system and learned some key facts about each of them. We then looked at two major models of the solar system - the geocentric and heliocentric models. We researched Copernicus and Galileo, then did a piece of writing about their very important discovery - that the Earth was NOT at the centre of the solar system - that it was in fact the Sun!

As part of settling into our new class and year group, Kingfishers have each been given a class responsibility. One of our Bramber Values is to be respectful and responsible and it is important that in our class, we all contribute to everyone being safe, comfortable and happy. 

The class responsibilities will change every half term, so everyone can experience different roles. 

We had a ball today! Here are just a few of the photos. Some of the highlights were:

- Finishing our space art by drawing manmade objects that can be found in space (ISS, rockets, astronauts).

- Learning how astronauts go to the toilet and brush their teeth.

- Playing a cooperative team game called 'Race to the Galaxy' and thinking about the importance of teamwork. 

- Sharing some of our favourite space books and things from home (some amazing little projects!)

- Writing mission briefings about each of the planets for NASA. 

- Learning about the phases of the moon and making them out of Oreos.

- Spontaneous sing-alongs to lots of different space-themed music (Fly me to the mooooooon...). 

Hinduism Workshop - 6.10.2022

On our Hindu workshop day, we enjoyed having some special guests come in to teach us about Hinduism. We learned how to greet people in India, we listened to stories about the Gods and Goddesses, we got to try on some traditional Indian clothing like saris and turbans and wear a bindi, we also learned a stick dance and then we finally got to paint our hands and faces. 

"Everybody partnered up with someone and painted on people's hands and face, everybody looked amazing! Thursday was brilliant" - Mason

"We had a brilliant time! Even the teachers loved it" - Martha, Isla N and Emilie

The first part of our monotype project was exploring marks that we could see in existing pieces of art. We looked at 13 pieces of art. We had one minute with each piece or art where we had to find a mark we liked and copy it. We built up a page in our sketchbooks of different marks and then had one 'free choice' round where we could create our own.

We found a way that we could create our own monotypes, using some old acetate (in Miss Dale's cupboard!), black paint and some plastic glue sticks. In this session, we all just had a go at creating patterns in the paint and printing into our sketchbooks. Some of us made 'ghost' monotype prints, using the second print from the acetate, which looked really effective. Harriet and Emilie even went home and tried the printing at home on paper and fabric! 

We made zines (little books) by folding A3 paper into eighths. This is the basis of our monotype art project. We then looked at the poetry we had all chosen and using the poem as a stimulus, created a palette of colour. From this palette of colour, we mixed colours that we wanted to use in our zines. We painted sugar paper with areas of colour that we will come back to and use for collaging later on in the project. A messy lesson, but lots of exploration, ideas and language came from it. Some quotes from our children:

Mason – I made a peach colour, I mixed orange and white.

Irenka – You can do this, to see what it looks like when you spread it out.

Eliza – I mixed the yellow, white, light green and dark green to make the green for the leaves of the cherry blossom tree.

Jemima – This is possibly my best colour – it’s sparkly.  I mixed the silver and brown paints.

Lulu – I made buttercup yellow! I mixed white and yellow.

Amber – I made a gold and I made light blue and I mixed them together to make turquoise.

Olivia – I mixed red and silver together and it made a lip-glossy colour.

Eliza – I made a yellow that’s like the inside of heaven.

We applied what we found out in our exploring session and made so many decisions about how we were all going to use monotype in our zine project. There was so much learning in this session: working out which pages would be seen and not when the book was folded, working out which pages would be the front and back covers, planning which pages we wanted to use for monotype only, monotype and collage and where we might want to include language from our poem. The children made lots of discoveries in this session. Lulu showed us all how to create a border with printing and also how to use a pencil to scratch designs onto the back of the covered acetate. Elle realised that the other end of the glue stick was a useful tool for scratching marks. Mahdi showed us how he had filled the page with one half original monotype and the other half the ghost monotype. Martha created a new technique by layering paint on top of a monotype printed area. We were just wowed by our class!

In this final making lesson, we used out monotype pages and painted collage paper to build up our zine. We used language from our poem to complete our projects. 

Rangoli Patterns!

Last week to celebrate Diwali we had a special guest come in to teach us how to create beautiful Rangoli Patterns. Mrs. Ramprasad from year 6 demonstrated to us how we could use brightly coloured powders to create beautiful designs and patterns on paper. We experimented by mixing the colours to make new ones and with different techniques of dropping the powder. We had an amazing time and made some incredible designs. 

Thank you to Mrs. Ramprasad and Happy Diwali from Kingfisher class!