Talking Textiles

Year 5 and I have been working on some 'talking textiles' - we've been using silk painting and batik to tell the ancient Egyptian myth of the Sun God Ra.

Batik is a very traditional technique for making patterns on fabric. We used melted wax to draw pictures on some white fabric, then when the wax hardened we dyed the fabric using cold water dyes (the top picture shows fabric being dyed in a bucket). The wax stops the dye from dying the fabric, so when you remove the wax (by ironing it between sheets of newpaper) you are left with your original picture in white against the colour you have dyed the fabric.
(It's not as complicated as I have made it sound!)

We have also done silk painting - Mrs Verrall and I think the results are really stunning.
The rest of the school will be able to see our work at the sharing day on Friday, but here is a preview of what we've been up to.

Louise (visual artist)

Growing things...

Here are some of the drawings and paintings made by Mrs Ripley's Year 3 class, as part of their project on plants and growing things.

I worked with the class a few weeks ago to make some observational drawings and paintings of plants. I brought in quite a few plants from my garden, and we used some plants from the school grounds too - especailly ivy and cow parsley.

First of all we we looked at the shapes of the plants. Not all leaves are the same, and I asked the year 3 pupils to look carefully at the shape of the different leaves and how the leaves join the stem.

In the afternoon we used acrylic paints to paint pictures of the plants in the classroom. I asked the class to look closely at the different colours they could see. It's surprising how many different shades of green there are!
At the end of the day we did a colour-mixing quiz and we mixed secondary colours (orange, purple and green) using only the primary colours (red, yellow and blue).
Do you know what colours to mix to make orange? What about purple or green?

Louise (visual artist)

Superbugs!

Before half-term Giles and I were working with Mrs Thatcher and Year 2 on their mini-beasts and habitats project.

We went on a bug hunt and were mini-beast detectives. We found out lots of interesting facts about the animals and their habitats (This was very useful when we had our mini-beast quiz).

We then designed our own Superbugs, putting together different body parts from different mini-beasts to make a SUPERBUG!

We used plasticine models to animate a short film about Superbugs and we're looking forward to showing it to the rest of the school at the sharing day on Friday 29th June.

Here are some pictures of our drawings and models.

Louise (visual artist)

Where's class 4?

I called in to year 4's classroom at the end of the day on Friday and thought I must have taken a wrong turning, as I seemed to be walking into a tropical rainforest.
The monkeys (and Giles and Miss Riddall) have been busy!

Louise (visual artist)

Sun, Earth, Moon, Day, Night and Much Much More…

I have been working with Year 5, Ms Verrall, Giles and Louise on their topic of Earth, Sun and Moon. And wow, have we covered a lot of ground!

We started with a session looking at the science behind things, answering questions about why the planets spin and why they orbit the sun. We looked at Newton’s ‘Laws of Motion’, in particular that nothing moves unless a force is applied to it and that an object which is moving at a steady speed in one direction will continue at the same speed and direction unless a force is applied to it. We defined a force as being a pull or a push. We then looked at how gravity is a force that pulls or attracts objects towards each other and discovered that the Sun pulls the planets into orbits around it because of gravity creating a ‘centripetal’ force which makes them move in a circular pathway. All planets spin and orbit the Sun because of this centripetal force created by gravity.

Translated into movement, this meant we spent the session being very physical! The class worked in partners with one person being the force making the other person move by giving a gentle push or by stopping their partner if they were already in motion. – In this way, we brought to life Newton’s Laws of Motion. We looked at different ways of pulling and pushing each other to explore what a force is, including having a ‘pushing’ competition which I think overall the girls won. We improvised with what it would be like to move on the Moon or Jupiter to show that the pull of gravity depends on the mass of an object. Lastly we tried out being the Sun and the Earth, with one person being the Earth trying to move in a straight line at a steady speed and the other person being the Sun, pulling the Earth into an orbit around it.

From all this, we have created two dance episodes made up of duets using pushing and pulling ‘force’ movements, bigger group movements and text to show on Friday’s sharing day.

But this is not all! We have also looked at an alternative explanation for how we have day and night. The class have looked at how the ancient Egyptians saw day and night, which includes: a God who can become a scarab beetle, a falcon and an old man; a boat; a serpent; a knife; and the underworld. (I will leave it to Year 5 themselves to add a more detailed version of the myth to the blog!)

We explored movements linked to being the different forms that the Sun God can take. From this we have created a moving tableaux showing the journey that Re the Sun God takes by day across the sky and another moving tableaux to show the perilous journey he takes by night to be able to return to the Earth each dawn. We are very happy with the result.

Year 5’s performance on Friday I think will be the most ambitious of all the groups as it will be a multi-media extravaganza. This means that it will include not just dance but also animation and visual art as well; Giles has been working on some science animation and Louise has worked on some Egyptian Batik art work. All of this we hope to link together to make one big performance about the Sun, Earth and Moon. There is still a lot to do to have it ready for Friday but I think we are up for the challenge and look forward to sharing it with everyone…!

Amanda (Choreographer)

Trekking Through the Rainforest...

I have been working with Year 4, Ms Riddall, Ms Eros, Giles and Joe on creating a rainforest in the heart of White House School.

With me, the class have been exploring the different levels in a rainforest. We have looked at the very top level where tall emergent trees grow up above the rest of the forest canopy. We have looked at the mid-level of the forest canopy itself and some of the epiphytes (air plants) and lianas (climbing plants) that grow on the trees there. And we have looked at the forest floor where only 2% of the sunlight reaches, where the trees have their great buttress roots to anchor them to the ground and fungi and other strange plants grow.

The class has worked in 5 teams and each team has made ‘pictures’ of the three levels in the rainforest using only their bodies to create the plants growing at each level. On the sharing day when Year 4’s classroom will have been transformed into a rainforest, (Giles is constructing it with the class and also making an animation to be shown in the room, Joe is creating a soundscape for it), the teams will enter their rainforest and silently, softly ‘become’ the rainforest.

We have also worked on some different animal movements ready for Giles to film this week and make into the animation. We have a collection of panthers, tigers, birds, gorillas, frogs, lizards and more to bring the rainforest to life.

Everyone has really pulled together and worked very hard to create our rainforest and we are all excited about sharing it with the rest of the school and parents. We hope that everyone will enjoy entering into another world when they visit Year 4’s classroom on Friday.

Amanda (Choreographer)

At Kew Gardens yr4 were looking at the amazing tropical rainforest which was vast and scorching.When we got in the palm house it wasn't like we expected to be,because it was very humid. When we were inside we were utterly bewilderd. Every time we went upstairs it got hotter and hotter.Up in the emergent part of the palm house it was very hot it felt like you couldn't breath.We went down into the marine section, we saw loads of fish and there was a 3d film. When we came out of the palm house we had our delicious lunch and then we went into the gift shop then went into our groups, and went to different places.

Some of us went to lilly pad house and we saw some massive lilly pads that we have never seen before, there was a plant called a Tricolor and a Papyrus. We also went in to the Prince of Wales conservatary were we saw the coconut tree, banana tree and cacoa tree. After that we went back to the coach and we were on are way home, yay! It took us 2 hours to get home, we finally got back to school and went home.

Written by Callum,Ellie and Elliot. Yr4.

Year 4's answer to global warming..

The first seeds have been sown in the year 4 classroom - the rainforest is coming! Carpet rolls have generously been donated by the Carpet Plus shop opposite the school and turned into tree trunks.. hundreds of lianas are sprouting up from the ground, and after tommorow's trip to Kew, ideas for what sort of plants and leaves might be growing there will soon transform the rest of year 4's classroom into dense tropical jungle!
Here's some photos of how the classroom used to look: keep watching because that rainforest is growing fast..

Giles (animator/junglator)

some more pictures from our trip.

our trip to the building site

year 6 went to the site where the new school is being built.When we arrived we were met by the site manager Rob.We were given saftey equipment of hard hats and yellow vests we were also given some gloves becuuse we needed protection from the cement which can burn .At the beginning we were given a saftey talk. Then Rob showed us how to lay some bricks every body got a go. After we had some questions to ask rob they were mainly about how green the new school is going to be. We asked him how many bricks they were using and he replied "we are using 52 000 bricks to build the whole school." We also asked him how much cement they were using and he replied "we are using 44 000 tones of cement." We saw the frame for the hall and open flat fields. we asked him what happened to the wild life that was nesting on the grounds he replied " we had to move a slow worm family and some insects.We recorded our conversation with rob and have all the answers on our new digital recorder.

BY Anna Dadswell year 6