Cityscape Art

Here is another post about our learning in Art this term.

Our focus has been learning how to use paints effectively. We have learned about the primary and secondary colours, and made some colour wheels by blending paints. We have also learned about using tints ans shades. A tint is a lighter colour made by adding white, whereas a shade is a darker colour made by adding black.

All the knowledge and skills that we picked up over the term have helped us in making our City Scape art. Everybody worked hard to make these works, and everybody can be proud of what they have accomplished.

The key points were learned were:
1 - In cityscapes, the colours used are lighter, and there is little detail. In the foreground, colurs are darker and there is greater detail.
2 - When blending paints to create new colours, always use small amounts at first. Even a small amount of a dark colour can make a huge difference to a lighter colour.
3 - Layout, colouring and brush strokes (texturing) can give the illusion of height and depth.

We hope that you enjoy our work.

Kandinsky Art

A couple of weeks ago, we finally finished our calendar art, which was based around Wassily Kandinsky's work. He created a lot of art that contained various geometric shapes, including squares, triangles, circles, and many forms of lines.

We tried to emulate his work using pastels. Most students produced two of three works, while some made many more. Everybody chose the one they liked most, and submitted it for calendar art.

This movie is a compilation of the hard work everyone put into this unit. Well done guys!!

Our Book Reviews, Our Book Shelf

Parent Interviews have finished for this term, and it has been great to hear all the positive feedback from pod 11's parents.

We have been preparing for our book talks this week by writing some book reports on a novel of our choice. I have written a report about a book I have read called Beyond the Darkwoods by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. It is the first in a series of books about "The Edge".

If you scroll down the page, you will see our Shelfari book shelf. Here we will put the books that we have read, and if you move your pointer over the books, the review that each child has written will appear.

As of today, only my review has been uploaded, but there will be many more to come - 26 in all by the end of the week. By clicking on the book, you will be taken to the books "site" at shelfari.com, where you can find out more about the book.
Enjoy.

Camp Reflections #4

Many people have asked me to post more of our Camp Reflections on our Writers Blog, so here are four more to read. This time we have writing from Devan, Emma, Keeli, and Phoebe. Please don't forget to leave comments. Enjoy.

My Greatest Feat

As you probably know, the Soccer World Cup is beginning this week in South Africa. A programme called My Greatest Feat is being run which encourages kids to get active. All of us in Pod 11 have been issued with pedometers, and each day, we record the number of steps we have taken, and record them on the My Greatest Feat website, which you can find here.

Everybody in Pod 11 knows the username and password for our class's account, it would be great if you could let your child show you how much work we have done to reach our goal of walking the All Whites to their first game in South Africa. There's lots of information for you to read, and interesting facts to help you learn about the country.

Another Set of Camp Reflections

As promised, there are more Camp Reflections on the writers blog. The fantastic writing this time around has been done by Jevon, Ben T., Jessica, and Ruby. It has been really great to see all the positive comments from parents, teachers and children about the previous writing. The kids have really enjoyed reading them with real tinkles in their eyes.

More Camp Reflections

We have posted some more camp reflections on our writing blog. The new posts are written by Lydia, Maggie, Eva, and Kahlee. There will be more later on in the week, so watch this space! Please remember to comment on the writing that you read - it makes a big difference to the students, and it does not need to be long or detailed at all.