Looking at Landscapes

For one of today's art activities we used the computers. The National Gallery of Art (in America) has some activities especially for kids. They've taken characters, objects and backgrounds from real paintings and created a site where we can make our own landscapes and portraits using them. We could re-size and move everything around until we were happy with our finished picture. Everyone's painting turned our differently, even though we had the same objects to choose from. It allowed us to be very creative. We used the landscape page today and Mrs N has promised we can try the portrait one next time. It was great fun!

Today's marshmallow challenge saw 3 towers standing at the end of the time limit. We're getting better each day! Meg, Allia and Caitlin's was 25cm, Taj, Matthew and Isaac's was 16cm and Catherine, Kiara and Ella's was 12cm. One more day to go!

Our other art activity today was a tricky one! We had to use our sense of touch more than our sense of sight. Each person was given a paper bag with a mystery object inside. Our job was to put our hand in the bag and feel the item inside (with absolutely no peeking!). We needed to pay particular attention to textures and shapes and sizes. At first, when we put our hand in and realised what the object was, we drew what we thought it would look like, instead of what it actually felt like. For example, even if we could tell the object was a calculator, we needed to use our sense of touch to work out how many buttons it had and what shape they were so we could draw it accurately. Drawing any old calculator wasn't enough. It had to be like the one in the bag! It got easier once we'd had a few tries.

And still, MORE art, but this time it was craft. We used coloured popsticks and toothpicks to make anything we wanted. Mrs N told us about how she used to make treasure boxes from popsticks when she was a little girl. Quite a few of us had a go at doing this too, but some of us had other ideas. Some people even wrote their name with popsticks!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N