This term the artist we are focusing on is Mondrian. Piet Mondrian is a famous artist, initially he painted mostly landscapes using the beautiful surroundings in the Netherlands as his inspiration. Mondrian spent some time in Belgium and this changed his style of painting. He painted using more lines and colours and often he would only use the primary colours of red, blue and yellow. Mondrian paints are distinctive as they are mainly of rectangles. He didn’t use a ruler to make his lines and would think carefully about where to place them.
This week the ladybird class have tried several ways of recreating their own Mondrian pictures. The started off just using wooden shapes, matching them to the pattern card. They then had a frame on the table and were given square and rectangle shapes to arrange in the frame. Then they had the opportunity of getting more creative by gluing coloured squares on to a frame and they have done a fantastic job and produced brilliant pictures. We will continue to get more creative next week using paint. By doing these activities the children have learnt that they need to listen carefully to understand the instructions given to them. We have also been able to incorporate lots of maths and language.
The children have had a sensory tray out all week with green jelly, dinosaurs and cars in it, they have had so much fun exploring it. They were a little bit reluctant to touch it at first but with encouragement they tried and found that they really enjoyed the texture, we were able to introduce lots of new words while playing for example, gooey, slimy, wet, cold, squishy and sticky. The children may not have heard some of these words before so this will help expand their vocabulary.
The children have done lots of different things this week, it has been so busy and a little messy but fun. I wonder what we will do next week?
