What Lies Within The Castle Walls?

Y2 have kicked off our Autumn expedition in style with a fun filled week of activites. To start the week, we had an exciting visit from an expert – Mr Lamb!!

We have been artists. We spent the week creating stained glass windows, castle flags, clay shields and tissue paper torches. We have also been looking at the story of Cinderella, thinking about the characters and of course Cinderella’s glass slippper. To finish the week we threw a party fit for princes and princesses – all the children came dressed to impress with their own crowns and played party games, ate buns and revealed our title and guiding question.

It has been lovely getting to know the children over the last two weeks and we are so excited to full jump into our expedition!

Every child is an artist…

Over the past two weeks the children across Norton Campus have been creating a piece of artwork that represents an olympic sport. The children have well and truly showcased their talents and artistic flair and have produced some beautiful artwork. Today we got chance to see the work they have created and we went on a Norton Campus gallery walk. Here’s what we saw…

The children took great pleasure in walking around both sites looking at the beautiful artwork that was on display…

The children across Norton Campus also wrote some beautiful postcards to one another which were warmly received and made everyone smile 🙂

Thank you to all those involved in this. It was a great success!

Gallery Walk

Class 2 had a wonderful morning looking at all the beautiful Olympic Games themed artwork that all our children had produced across both schools. The children were especially excited to walk around the Junior School and the experience gave them a great opportunity to talk about the amazing artwork together.

Punch and Judy Puppet show.

As part of continuing summer expedition, “What happens where the sea meets the shore?” Today the children of Nursery were celebrating “World Ocean Day” by all wearing blue in support of keeping our world’s oceans clean and safe. They also began thinking about their own experiences of the seaside and what there is to see and do at the coast. We were extremely lucky to be able to host our expert visitor Mr Dan, who performed a wonderfully, traditional, seaside favourite; A Punch and Judy Puppet Show for us. The children had a magical time and there was lots of fun, laughter and enjoyment all around.

Today was a memory that the children will remember forever! Such a wonderful treat – Beautiful Work!

We are artists in Year One

Over the last few weeks we have been working hard to develop our art skills. We have worked on our line drawing, pattern and texture techniques as well as colour mixing and shading. We are extremely proud of our pieces of art that represent some of the landmarks in and around Doncaster.

Nursery’s Fish

Beginning in hook week, Nursery began to draw pictures of a Sea Perch carefully chosen for it’s simple and recognisable outline and detailed body. The children first observed only the picture of the Sea Perch and completed their first drafts of the fish. Nursery worked very hard at creating drawings using lines and circles, whilst concentrating on the visual and this activity took quite some time as everyone was trying their best.

Three weeks later our Nursery children attempted a second draft of their fish, but before they began, Nursery watched a short clip about a little boy called Austin, who drew a Butterfly. When Austin drew his first butterfly, despite having the picture in front of him, it looked like the one he visualised in his head. With the critique, help and support of his peers who gave small wonders on how Austin could gradually improve his butterfly to look more like the original picture. (Please check this out on YouTube) Austin produced this butterfly below as his final draft. Our children really responded to the video clip and were amazed at how much Austin’s Butterfly had improved. This gave them a good understanding of how to critique their own work, by just changing one or two things.

Here are some of our drafts for comparison, the children worked very hard to ensure their area of improvement was achieved and we are immensely proud of them. Check this beautiful work out!!

Football Logos

Class Five are looking to the teacher versus parent community football match! (Keep your eyes peeled for more details about it coming soon!) We have been busy designing and voting for logos for our teacher football kit!

Awesome job class five ⚽️

Incredible Artists

We have been working really hard this week to learn as much as we can about Doncaster Mansion House. Not only have we been learning about why it is such a significant landmark in Doncaster but we have been creating beautiful artwork of it too. We began by looking at the building as artists and working out what shapes we could see, what the distinguishing features are and discussing what techniques we could use in our own artwork. We worked collaboratively too, to complete a jigsaw of the Mansion house. That forced us to look carefully at the building again and learn about the shapes and lines we are going to need to create our pieces. We all then began our first drafts – we ended the session with a gallery walk to begin to critique our work so far.

I’m looking forward to seeing the final drafts! Well done Class Five

Resilient Artists

We began our art case study this afternoon by looking at Doncaster landmarks and beginning to create pieces to represent them. We began with the Yorkshire Y. We though about tints and tones and practised our colour mixing skills to help us with our final pieces whilst some of us got drafting!

I was blown away with the perseverance and resilience shown to create the perfect shape. We thought about critique and redrafting and we were really proud of our creations.

Keep it up Class 5 – you’re creating beautiful work!

Mrs Parsons xx

Spots and Dots

We had a great community meeting this morning. We thought really hard about resilience and bravery particularly when it comes to completing beautiful work that we might find tricky.

We listened to the story called The Dot about a little girl called Vashti who found art difficult but worked hard and succeeded. We all got a dot of our very own to create our own mini piece of art work which we put together to make our very own dotty masterpiece.

We finished our community meeting with crew champions – we are really proud of all of you.

Mrs Parsons