Melissa's Melting Pot

What went well? The children learnt the benefits of magnifying glasses to observe objects closely. For their age they produced detailed drawings of their shells observing the different patterns, textures, sections, colours noticed and contours. Children referred back to the object frequently by looking through the magnifying glass to check their drawing against their object. Children then progressed onto making models of their shells out of Plasticine they again focused on getting the correct shape and contours of their shell and began to draw in patterns using their pencils to carve in to create textures.  Why did it go well? Gave them lots of prompts throughout the activity to keep children motivated and using the magnifying glasses got them engaged in the activity more as excited by this new piece of equipment. What did not go as planned or work well? Lack of explanation as felt pushed for time when in fact if we had spent more time properly explaining and mo

For Science we went into a school and taught a lesson on observation to small groups of children. We based our lesson on the one which we had had earlier in the year and wrote up a lesson plan (then annotated it afterward which are the bits in red) Here is the lesson plan which we used to teach this lesson: Here are some photos from the lesson... They used Plasticine to try and model the shells and explore observation of patterns The children drew out what they saw, what was quite interesting was that one child looked really closely and saw that the shell actually sparkled so drew that in by sketching little stars on the shell.

In our Art seminar we were learning about three key art movements which were Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Fauvism. I've never actually had to do any work on any of these art movements so it seemed like a huge task to take on in a two hour seminar, but actually worked really well as we not only covered the main points of each style but also did a quick painting for each as well. We began by discussing photographs of famous artists work such as 'The Torn Hat - by Thomas Sully' and 'The Luncheon of the Boating Party - by Pierre Auguste Renoir' and the question put to us was "Why do Artists choose to use certain colours?"  We discussed this and came to the conclusion that there are many different reasons such as to represent emotion and colour, to add life to pictures, highlight key areas whilst throwing shadows on those which you wish to be more mysterious, and to draw the viewers eye into the picture. Also looking at shades of the same colour we