Art Work – Banton Biggies

Outdoor Learning May 2025

This week is an outdoor learning where each class has one day when they try to spend as much time as possible outside. The Biggies, minus the primary sevens, had a day on Tuesday this week.

Pendulum Art

We startedthe day with some pendulum art.

In the morning we did some pendulum art, we did pendulum art by attaching a cup with a hole at the bottom onto a piece of string them we put paint in it and then we swung the pendulum over paper to make some art. We did it outside because we didn’t do it inside because the floor would get too dirty. We attached the cup by having a bit of string hanging A bit of string from a stick suspended between 2 chairs, we put some weights and a carabiner and we put a wire to hold the cup onto the carabiner.
Robert

I got back just after playtime when my class was doing a huge piece of artwork. There was a huge giant piece of black paper and there also was a long thin thread over the basket ball hoop. At the end of the thread there was knot tied to a karabiner holding twisted wire holding a cup with a hole and paint in it. Robert my best friend was holding the thread keeping everything up. I was amazed.

This is pendulum art. How it works is if you push the cup or let go of the cup from not where the cup gravitates to the cup will swing in cool patterns letting paint out to mark those patterns. We did three different colours and it looked amazing in the end. It was nearly lunch time so we had to bring the gigantic art piece in when the rain decided to come.
Gene

Yesterday was outdoor learning day. In the morning we started by making some pendulum art we needed to have a cup, two chairs, string, metal wire, some paint, rocks, paper, sticks and a pencil. We made a pendulum by placing the chairs opposite each other then placing the stick on top. We used the pencil to pierce the bottom and the sides of the cup for the paint to leak through. We used metal wire as a hook to put in the 2 holes on the sides to hold the cup up then we connected the metal wire to the string with a carabiner. We added some washers for some weight we then rotated the string on the stick till it was about 5-10cm off the ground then we got some paper and placed it down after we placed the paper down we then got some rocks to weigh the paper down. Then we put the paint in the cup and started to swing it, it made some cool art so we tried it on a bigger paper with more colours too.
Jason

Firepit

How we did this is we used a sharp knife to chop the wood. First the person with the knife will put their hand on the wood chunk about 3/4 down. Second they will carefully grab the knife and put it about in the middle of the wood chunk and remove their hand. Third they would say tap and another person with a large and thick wood stick would hammer the knife into the wood and repeat this until the top of the knife was in. Lastly the wood hammer the edge of the knife until the wood chunk was split in two.
Gene

Around the Fire

We didn’t get any photos around the fire. This does keep happening. The pupils all know the rules and are very respectful fo fire.

We did a fire in the fire pit we did some fruit over the fire pit and marshmallows, the fruit tasted really nice so did the marshmallow but i burned it a bit but the bananas tasted nice.it was really fun
Billie

Then we got the fire pit roaring. We told some spooky stories and then we had some marshmallows on sticks (I accidentally burnt mine ). Later on, we had our fruit skewers.
Xander

After lunch we made a fire, we tried using our flint and steels but we couldn’t get them to work so we just used a lighter, we light a cotton pad and put it to the wood. When the fire was good enough we started cooking our marshmallows, mine kind of went black but it tasted amazing! When the fire went down a bit we put on our fruit kebabs that we prepared earlier. They where quite good.
Robert

A wee while later, we had a fire pit, we had fruit skewers and toasted marshmallows. I didn’t have any because I don’t like it, I would rather have something different that I like. We also shared some stories and also made some up with a sentence each, Mr. Johnston also came out with a talking stick and asks us loads of questions about ourselves, shortly after it was home time.
Chloe

We also made some fruit skewers to grill we were also toasting marshmallows. Most people burnt/dropped they’re marshmallow but I didn’t I burnt mine but I didn’t drop it in took the crust off and ate it and repeated that till i finished my marshmallow. We played a game about creating a story everyone got to say one sentence to create the story. Then we gone inside to get our fruit skewers then we put them on the grill for about 5 minutes. The apple didn’t taste the best the banana taste quite good and the strawberry was very sour. After everyone finished they’re skewers we told some stories until 2:50PM then we went inside and started cleaning up then it became 2:55PM and the first bell rang. We put on our jackets and bags and then we went home.
Jason

The tree has maths baubles, made with our maths skills of measuring of length & angles. And micro:bit ones too. To make the micro:bit ones we need to make 2 animations called from functions. This is the first time we have incorporated functions in our micro:bit code. The microbits are controlled via another micro:bit and the radio feature. There are loops and comparisons involved too.

If you press the play button above you will be able to see the different animation by pressing button A or B. Pressing both together should stop the animation.

Screenshot of the code from Robert’s iPad

The tree itself is made with cardboard & makedo.

We had quite a relaxing day today after our Christmas show yesterday afternoon & evening. We did some maths work looking at tessellation and transformation of shapes, first on paper then in Keynote. We used the idea of Stained Glass windows for the keynote¹ and practised our skills in grouping and transforming shapes. We also use images that we are allowed to use legally. We didn’t just grab them from google.

Most of the images have attribution on the image, the other ones used these photos:
Flickr Photo: Aurora by QIAOS license:Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Flickr Photo: Northern Lights In Tromso by B Lucava license:Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

The idea borrowed from Winter Wonderland 2024 – Renfrewshire Apple Regional Training Centre ↩︎

Outdoor Learning Day November 2024

The weather outside was frosty, so the Biggies wrapped up well. We also popped in for hot juice and to warm up now and again.

The target for recognition today was “to stay on task” and the pupils were brilliant.

We started off in random pairs working on measure. We measured the length, breadth and height of different structures around the playground. The target was to measure accurately. After we finished we compared results and were almost all within a few centimetres of each other.

After the interval we worked on Art. The idea was to compare different medium. Looking at the bare trees, everyone made some pencil sketches, a charcoal picture and took some photos. The results speak for themselves.

1. The thing I like about the pencil sketch is the way I made the branches and how exactly I made the branches.
2. The thing I like about the charcoal sketch is how I outlined the thing and blended it together to make it look nice.
3. The thing I like about using a pencil to sketch is how easy it is to fix mistakes and how you can shade especially easy.
4. The thing I like about using a charcoal to sketch is that blending is very easy and blending can also be used to make very cool drawings.
5. The difference between pencil and charcoal is that charcoal is on black and can blend easily and pencil is grey and can’t blend together but you can make it lighter or darker shades of grey. I personally prefer charcoal because with blending you can make some beautiful artworks.
Robert

I like my pencil sketch because it looks a lot like the tree is used to draw it.

I like my charcoal sketch because it was my first time using charcoal for art because I have only used charcoal pens not actual sticks of charcoal.

I like using a pencil to draw because you can rub out mistakes when you make when drawing and you can also shade if your doing a black and white drawing because if you do it with only black when doing a black and white drawing it will just be black and white with no shading.

I liked using charcoal because you can smudge it with the drawing but it is really messy and it is like rubbing out because you can make the black lighter if you go to hard.

The difference between the charcoal and the pencil is that charcoal you can’t rub out with a rubber but you have to use your hand or arm to rub out mistakes and it is also smaller than pencils but you can rub out stuff with pencil unlike charcoal.
Jason

I like my pencil sketch, I’m pretty sure it looked quite accurate but I didn’t get all the details. I was quite alright with just doing a little bit of it.
My charcoal sketch was pretty good but I think it was a bit messy. But I quite like how it feels and how smooth it is.
Using a pencil to draw is quite easy and fun, the same goes for charcoal but it is a bit harder. But at least it’s good for shading and smudging in stuff.
I prefer pencil it is way easier but I would pick charcoal for shading stuff.
Chloe

In the afternoon we had a show rehearsal inside and then out for the final hour. The Children revisited their tress and wrote some poems. It was getting colder so we didn’t spend too long on that and finished the day with a game of capture the flag.

The Wolves of Banton

We have been reading The Eye of the Wolf by Daniel Pennac in class. This has lead to some research and the start of some writing.

We also too an idea from Darrell Wakelam and made our own 3D Wolves. This allowed the Biggies to use their practical and creative skills.

We might add some more detailed images once we have named our wolves.

Natural Sculpture

We have been searching the playground for different creatures, and today had a go at making some of our own.

Inspired by work done in the Biggies in 2018:

All natural insect sculptures: Banton Beasties

And by A garden alive with art: all-natural insect sculptures

We searched the playground for natural materials and created these amazing insects.

Grid Drawing

compare Lexi’s two images, she made the grid one first.

Today we tried a new technique for drawing. Using a photo of a Buff Tailed Bumble Bee that Blair found while picking litter. We added a grid over the top and copied it onto a grid on paper. This allowed us to see proportions and sizes.

We also made some drawings on plain paper to compare.

Highlights of the Week 10 Mar 2023

The Biggies did a great job working with the primary 1 & 2s in our ‘makerspace’ this week. Last week they helped the wee one design a mythical creature and this week we got to tether to create cardboard versions. We shall makes these into 3D creatures in the next couple of weeks.

In maths we had a Scratch Challenge:

Scratch Shape Challenge

Josh did a great job, including working out how to use messaging to stop sprites deleting other sprites drawings:

We saw a different sort of shape with this triangle in the playground:

Autumn Leaves #ourdoorlearning fun

We are going to try and get outdoors a bit more this month. Today was a beautiful clear day with only a little wind, a good day for some leaf art.

We went out and gathered leaves of different shapes and colours for the play ground. First we created designs and patterns with the leaves, thinking about colour and shape.

After that we cut leaves in half and sketched in the other half, trying to match the veins and shade and blend colours.

The class enjoyed working outdoors and identified some of the reasons:

It felt peaceful, calm and relaxed. We had better concentration. We felt free. We could sit beside different people had more choice and enjoyed working with nature.

We will be adding all of our work to the blog soon to the Art Gallery and add links from here.

Art start

This year we have been doing some art work and we made some silhouettes and we made them all different colours. Lots of us made them different kinds of flowers and they all looked really cool.

Here is a picture of the work that we have done of the flowers.
We were thinking of the different shapes and colours and how they went together. The pictures were stuck together on black card.

We did this other piece of art when Mr. Johnston gave us a flower and we had to sketch it out. We had to draw flowers while looking at them so they had more detail.

We also made a pattern of leaves thinking about the negative shapes.

These pieces of work are for the Banton flower show. We are going to be making one more piece of art and we will be picking out of one of them each to send to the show.

By Alex, Ellie and Luke

Category: Art Work