4 Season Magazine Tree Collage

During art last week we made a collage using magazine clippings! We are focusing on tree's this week as a part of our National Parks HSIE focus. I printed each student a tree stencil broken up into four parts (one for each season). We discussed what kinds of colours you would see on trees in different seasons and looked at photographs of trees in summer, autumn, winter and spring! They loved looking at the pictures and talking about the colours. I drew the outline on the board and labelled each season for them and wrote what colours each season needed to be. They then cut out clippings from magazines to create a collage for each part of the tree. We used  dark greens for summer, red/orange/browns/yellow for autumn, newspaper or black and white for winter and pinks and lighter greens for spring. We put kidz bop on and they sung while they searched for colours and pasted clippings onto their stencils. They are coming along very nicely. The kids are just far too careful; I need to find a way to motivate them to take risks and worry less about the state of perfection of their artwork. Here is an example that I showed the students prior to the lesson. If there is one thing I have learnt from teaching art; it is that you must always show then a finished product first. That way they know exactly what it should look like and can use the example to guide their ideas. 

Walk Safely To School Day

Hi guys! I have recently ran Walk Safely to  School Day at the school I am doing my internship on! It was so much fun coordinating the celebrations for a special day like WSTSD! And it wasn't hard to organise! I highly recommend coordinating the day if you ever get the chance, or if you need an easy way to get involved in the school whether it's for your accreditation (fulfilling the standards) or your CV! It is so important that students understand basic road safety and know the importance of physical activity and how they can get moving! To celebrate the day we had a poster competition. Each class participated. I gave each teacher an information pack containing the road safety guidelines that should be teaching their kids (dependent on stage) and some lesson ideas, find a words, crosswords, ideas for posters as well as colouring in pages. I let each teacher decide what they wanted to focus on, what size paper they would choose and how in depth the posters should be. A few of the younger grades did simple colour in stencils that their teachers had made for them, while the older grades came up with their own ideas, slogans and illustrations. I showed my class some posters I had found online (regarding road safety), some road safety campaigns and some tv advertisements regard info road safety. I then got my class to brainstorm slogans, and asked them to think about what would catch their eye when looking at a poster. Some kids got really creative, it was great fun! And such a great time to revisit road safety and stranger danger! So here are each of the winning posters for the whole school. Each teacher had to pick a class winner (as we have limited space to display the posters) and each composite class was allowed a winner from each year. Today I hung each poster on display in the library and presented them with their certificates at assembly, they turned out so well! So there is an effortless way to refresh kids memories on road safety, obtain a nice display for the school library or office and have a lot of fun creating posters!