Class 8’s focus during Arts week has been the rainforest. We have used a range of artistic techniques to create a variety of animals, trees and plants that you might find in the rainforest. Some cute and adorable, and others ginormous and scary! Throughout the week, we have used clay, paint, pastels, chalk, collage and different materials to create some beautiful pieces of work.
Firstly, we got the paints out and we did blow painting to effectively create the colourful feathers on a parrot. We used our paint brush to add various watercolours to the parrot and then used a straw to blow the paint in the direction of the feathers. It looked extremely beautiful because the colours started to blend together! After that, we dipped the palm of our hands into either brown paint or grey paint and printed it on our piece of card. Can you guess the animals we were making? Monkeys and elephants! We then added features to bring our handprints to life. We added a face to the monkeys and large hanging ears to the elephants. We also added vines for the monkeys to hang from and trees for the elephants to eat from! It was great fun! We then practised our circulism drawing technique with chalk and created some great frog pictures. We added features to the frog and to the background. After lunch we began getting messy! We used clay to sculpt spiders, leaves and snakes. It was quite tricky because it was so fiddly but we persisted and tried our hardest! We had to leave them to dry for a few days before we could paint them.
On the second day, we drew a colourful chameleon and a scary tiger! We carefully followed the step by step instructions and we were so pleased with the outcomes! We attentively coloured our pictures in with oil pastels, ensuring that we coloured up to the lines and didn’t leave any blank spaces. After lunch we began our collage lesson by looking at photos of the rainforest and discussing the different features. We then worked collaboratively in pairs and used different materials to create a 3D model of the rainforest including the tree trunks, tree tops, flowers and vines. We even used kitchen roll tubes to shape the tree trunks! We ripped or cut different types of paper and scrunched them up to create a textured effect on the tree tops. Our final project was a class collage of the rainforest where the children had a section of a picture to bring to life using collage paper. They had to think extremely carefully about the colours they were selecting!
The next day, we created a spooky bat by placing a template on a large black piece of paper and using various colours of chalk to scrape lines on the outside of the template. We then used our fingers to blend the colours to create an impressive effect and removed the template to leave a fabulous silhouette! Then we used artistic techniques to complete a sketch of a rainforest leaf. We used special sketching pencils and paper to carefully draw the leaf and we worked really hard to ensure they included all of the features, such as the veins and the jagged edges. In the afternoon, we finished our collaging projects off by adding different animals to bring them to life.
On our final day of Arts week, we got crafty using pipe cleaners, lollipop sticks and beads to create butterflies and dragonflies. These were quite fiddly but we carefully followed the step by step instructions. We then spent time exploring and experimenting with different percussion instruments to imitate the sounds of various rainforest animals. We then learnt a song called ‘A Walk through the Rainforest’ and put this together with what we had learnt with the percussion instruments. The final performance involved us singing the song whilst taking it in turns to use our instrument to create the sound of a frog, monkey, toucan or tiger! Then, we put on our PE kits and took part in a dance lesson in the hall. We discussed how various rainforest animals move and, in small groups, we decided how we could imitate this within a dance. We had so much to think about because we had to listen to which animal we could hear in the music, perform the move and ensure we were moving to the sound of the beat! At the end of the lesson, we all put together our ideas and created one final dance performance. After lunch, we painted our clay models and we had to concentrate extra hard to use a fine paint brush to add the small details. We also painted rainforest leaves and painted a watercolour background for our rainforest silhouettes to be stuck to.
We all worked incredibly hard throughout the whole week and it was fabulous to see our wonderful creations around the classroom and on our Arts Week display. Miss Payne, Miss Aldam and Miss Sheppard were incredibly proud of every single child. Some children said ‘it was the best week ever!’ and some have said ‘I’ll never forget this week!’. 
