Christine has begun getting the children to record their own sound clips outside with a sound recorder. We listened to some of the sounds and looked at the sound waves and we're hoping to tie in the visuals of the waves with the sounds themselves.
Lots more butterflies - everyone's continuing to cut out various sized butterflies (Joanne counted over 200!) for our installation. Everybody suggested ideas for how to display them - almost all of them involving string.

We began this week by giving some time over to Lizzie who'd suggested an experiment to Christine the previous week. We called it 'Lizzie's lovely leaves' experiment and it involved placing some dead leaves between some tissue paper, leaving it for a while and seeing the imprint it made on the paper.
Everyone recorded the experiment in their sketch books, the second of which is rapidly filling up already.

We began this morning by chopping up some vegetables and piercing them with toothpicks so that the top of the vegetable could sit atop a jar filled with water. Everyone sketched the plants/vegetables as they sat in the jars in front of them. Christine encouraged everyone to draw 'blind' - looking at the plant only - but quite a few seemed out of practice. We've agreed to do this as a 'warm-up' exercise from now on.

A break, then, from the Christmas play and worrying about learning lines! We began with some márla activities - the idea was to recreate one of Klee's paintings in 3-D form. The kids set about the task with vigour but it became apparent that there was some difficulty with regard to how to actually create something 3 dimensional. The emphasis was placed on the need to move away from flat objects.

A busy day began with a discussion of shapes - 2D and 3D - and their prevalence in the world around us. We tried some still life sketches using fruit - everyone sketched 'blind' to begin with by looking at the fruit and largely ignoring the page (telling a child not to look at the page is akin to the episode of Father Ted where Dougal's told NOT to press the button on the aeroplane!)

The day began with some fun activities; Christine showed everyone how to make spinning tops with cardboard and pencils and everyone dropped them on their sketch books to make some designs. We then joined the dots to make patterns emerge. Everyone saw something different in their designs.
We also worked with graphite which Christine mixed with water and everyone got their fingers dirty making some more patterns. Messy but fun!

Our first on-site day. Having met Christine last week in the sculpture centre, the children were happy to see her - having no homework for the night certainly helped. We looked at some images by Paul Klee and learned a little about his life. We found animals, people, buildings and ships hding in his pictures.
Most of the day was spent outside - after break we used a tree stump as an inspiration by counting the rings and sketching what we saw. Christine supplied everyone with magnifiers - everyone had a little mini-beast hunt and sketched what they found.

A delayed start to our project then....but hopefully will be worth the wait. First chance for the budding artists to meet Christine so we travelled to Manorhamilton sculpture centre - a fantastic open plan building. Once there, Christine guided us around some of the displays - the giant sliotar (Setanta's?) went down a treat, as did most of Christine's work.