Reception have had a brilliant arts week this week! The children have loved exploring different art forms and techniques and above all getting messy!
Reception based their arts week around The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We discussed Eric Carle as an illustrator and looked at how he used different shades as he created his characters and drew the settings. The children have been able to have a go at a variety of activities to explore and develop different skills. This has included;
- Leaf threading
- Creating symmetrical play dough butterflies
- Using water colours to make stained glass butterflies
- Using natural materials to create different insects.
- Making our own paper and using it to create Eric Carle styled pictures.
- Painting in different shades in the style of Eric Carle.
- Creating caterpillars with egg boxes.
- Creating character puppets to tell the story.
- Making paper chain hungry caterpillars.
Our main project has been to create a butterfly patchwork. Each child has designed their own butterfly using a wax resist technique – using crayons and brusho inks. They then learnt how to sew, stitching on ribbons and lace and adding buttons for extra effect. The butterflies will now be sewn together to create one giant patchwork with a square created by each child in our reception – it will look amazing!
As well as all these busy activities the children were lucky enough to work with two artists. First Paul Pickford visited us and helped us to create some very messy, hairy caterpillars! We mixed our own green paint and added caterpillar hairs and glue to make a sticky paint! We then painted foam balls which we joined together with wire to create our caterpillars, before using felt to add details such as eyes and antenna! It was lots of fun and we got very messy!
Secondly we had a visit from a puppet artist called Mandy. She brought in some of her amazing puppets to show us and told us the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar using her puppets. Her puppets were made of wire, pipe cleaners and wool. We were then keen to make our own puppets so Mandy showed us how to make a sock puppet caterpillar and we used wire and cellophane to make a beautiful butterfly. We then used a similar cellophane technique to make the fruits and foods from the story for our caterpillar to munch through. Our work looks amazing!
Click on the class name to see the children creating their patchwork butterflies – Voyagers Discoverers
Click on the class name to see the children working with Paul – Voyagers Discoverers
Click on the class name to see the children working with Mandy – Voyagers Discoverers
Take a look at some of our amazing finished pieces…….
