We’ve been doing P.E at Eastwood with the S6s coaching us in different sports. It’s a great opportunity to visit the high school, meet some of the P.E staff and improve our skills in different sports.

We’ve been focusing on art this week. We experimented with shade and highlights using charcoal and chalk to create Tim Burton style portraits. We then looked at the abstract work on Kandinsky and created our own art using shapes and colours to convey emotions.

It’s showtime!

Continuing our focus on drama, this week the class have been learning about how body language, posture and proximity to one another can help with indicating the relationship between characters. The pupils tested this by posing and recreating family portraits in front of the class. There was a lot of hilarity trying to identify the members of each family!  Another activity involved  pupils randomly selecting two words which they had to use as the name of their character and then decide why their new persona was famous. In groups, they then improvised and acted out a chat show scene where the pupils had to stay in character whilst taking part in a short conversations between themselves and the host. Following this, each group sent their main character to the ‘green room’ where all of the personalities had to introduce themselves to each other. At the end of the week the pupils were set the challenge to independently create a short performance of a TV show for a specific audience. I was impressed with the fantastic effort that went into writing creative scripts and application of drama skills to bring their characters to life! Finally, the children used the iPads and iMovie to edit their videos and insert additional features into their recordings including sound, text and images.

It has been a pleasure teaching P7a the last two weeks and I hope everyone has a great holiday – Mr Atkinson

Lights, camera, action!

This week the pupils have been eagerly participating in activities to hone and develop their drama skills. First the children shared their experiences of drama and discussed the different types of TV genres including reality, cartoon, news and comedy. Then the pupils explored how adjusting their tone, volume and pace can help to express emotions. Equipped with this knowledge, the children challenged each other to portray different feelings during conversations and had to guess which ones were being performed. After discovering how voice actors bring to life cartoon characters, the class then made their own attempt by working in pairs to create backgrounds for some unusual people including coming up with a catchphrase and a voice for them. To finish the week, P7A have been learning how to create  ‘soundscapes’ by using their bodies to produce noises.