Year 2

Term 1

This term we have been learning about architecture. We watched a video about what architecture is and looked on Google Earth at our school. It was really exciting zooming into local places like Leeds Castle, Maidstone Museum and Mote Park to see a bird’s eye view. We talked about how we see our local environment differently to birds and how a dog would see things differently too. We wrote our ideas down in our class Working Book. We then looked at different drawing materials s and had a go at doing some quick sketches of architecture, some continuous line drawings and some drawings only using straight lines.

We then looked at the work of architect Hundertwasser. We talked about the curvy lines and all the small mosaic looking pieces in the buildings and how they look similar or different to other buildings that we’ve seen.

After that we worked in groups to build airport control towers of synagogues. We had lots of photos to refer to and designed through making, using flat cut out pieces to create buildings.

Finally we decorated our buildings in similar styles to Hundertwasser. Some of us painted them, some of us stuck materials onto them and some of us did a combination of both. At the end of the project we discussed how our work could be presented. We made a selection of plinths, backgrounds etc and took photos of our work on the Ipads. We uploaded our work to Seesaw to create a digital display.

Term 2

Year 2 have been learning about Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist who paints with dots. We looked at some of her artwork and the children considered what they would like to do using dots. First they talked about the difference between arts and crafts and created dotty viewfinders. They then decided that they would like to turn the art studio into a dotty room like Yayoi Kusama did. We covered the walls and floor in white rolls of paper and the children used dot stickers, circles cut out of coloured paper and also drew dots straight onto the paper. At lunchtime we invited the rest of the school into the art studio to see our work and add some extra dots to it.

We then took photo of the children in the art, using the Ipads and the children edited them themselves, adding more dots into the background and smaller dots onto themselves so that they became part of the art. The children saved their work on Seesaw so that a wider audience could see their work.

Last but not least the children made collages using different coloured paper and then used cotton buds dipped in paint to turn them dotty! Everyone really enjoyed this topic!

Term 3

This term Year 2 have been learning about Peru. In art we looked at the work of some Peruvian textile artists and learnt that they usually use wool from sheep, llamas and alpacas to weave with. The children had a go at weaving using paper and then the following lesson they used these skills that they had learnt to sew with fabric and wool using cardboard weaving looms. We had to push the fabric to the tops of the looms to make sure there weren’t any gaps once we took the fabric off it.

After that we photocopied the weaving and used the copies as some backgrounds for some llama drawings. We watched a video about how to draw llamas then all customised our drawings to make them our own. We had all sorts of ideas like wearing flowers in their hair, jewellery, tattoos, eating carrots and even a Harry Potter themed llama! We think they look fabulous!