Category Archives: Expressive Arts

Introduction to our John Muir Journey

This term we have started learning about John Muir. John Muir is one of the most famous explorers and conservationists. John Muir was born in Dunbar, near Edinburgh in 1838. He became known for his fascination with nature and how to conserve it.  He introduced the concept of National Parks. These days, there is a charity named after John Muir called the John Muir Trust and various walks and paths in his name.

So far, to gain the John Muir Award we have:

  • conducted litter picks
  • created a portrait of John Muir
  • conducted a Tree Health Survey
  • created natural art using various pieces of nature from our school grounds
  • conducted a bird count
  • clear an area to help us conserve our grounds
  • worked with the Neilston Development Trust to plan various vegetables

We will be continuing to work towards gaining the John Muir Award and are looking forward to completing our journey!

Wild Life Posters

This week our writing focussed on structure and layout. We chose to write about a wild animal that we are interested in. We then chose to lay our writing out in poster form. We structured our writing under 4 subheadings:

  • Habitat
  • Diet
  • Physical Appearance
  • Interesting Facts

As part of our Big Talk homework, we researched our wild animals at home using our subheadings to help us. We then discussed our animals at home with our friends and family. In class, we discussed specialist vocabulary that we might want to use in our posters.

Here are some examples of our finished posters:

Beth’s poster on the Orangutan
Connor’s poster on the Koala
Renaska’s poster on the Hazel Dormouse
Abbie’s poster on the Meerkat
Beth’s poster on the Blue Tongued Skink

Outdoor Classroom Day

On Thursday 1st of November we took part in Outdoor Classroom Day.

First we went on a nature walk to take pictures for our Digital Photography Competition. We took pictures of things like flowers, leaves, trees, clouds and rainbows. We then entered our photographs into the competition. You can see some of our entries below.

Next we collected materials from the school grounds that were natural. We then went into the outdoor classroom and created our own pieces of natural art. You can see some examples of our art below.

Pop UK – School Show

At the end of May we worked with Pop Uk  to put on our school show. Ellen helped us to learn seven songs in just a few days!

We also learned some dances to the songs. We worked really hard and our efforts results in two fabulous shows on the 30th May.

Our audience really got involved and seemed to really enjoy the show as much as we did.

Taylor – I really like performing on the stage. My favourite thing was the Medley.

Olivia – I really enjoyed doing the actions for all the songs.

Expressive Art

In P 5b we took a class vote to see what we wanted to call our groups in the class. in our groups we came up with themes. Then  we voted to find the top 4 choices, then voted again to find the winner.

The class chose animals – we then created our own design of our animals for display. We focussed on creating a colourful background and a creative design for our animals using strong colours.

Here are our designs :-

We voted for our favourite designs  – here are our winners.

Leopard by Cameron – “I liked the colouring on my leopard the best”

Lion by Jessica – “I was happy that the class voted for my design”.

Cheetah by Daisy – ” I am pleased with the background to my design”.

Meerkat by Beth S – ” I like the way I mixed the colours in my background.”

Social Justice

 

When P4 were doing bounce back they looked at social justice. They learned that social justice was about being fair and caring for all people in the world. They discussed the different groups who try to make sure that things are fair for all people. Save the Children was mentioned as well as many other charities.

In writing the children wrote thank you letters to Mrs. Strang for the work that she does for  Save the Children and making things fair for children across many countries.

P4 looked at some  art work that represented social justice and had an interesting discussion about how they managed this. They then used the visual elements of line, shape, colour and pattern  to create their own piece of  art work  showing the image of a handshake.

Here are two of the letters by Ruby and Rhys.