Corner Bookmarks and Abstract Trees

Over the last 3 Fridays we've had 'Activity Afternoons' in school. Being the art co-ordinator, my chosen activity was obviously art and I ended up having about 25 children plus 2-3 incredibly helpful parents. Last year, we made the large 3D papier-mache letters (seen here) but I went for a change this year and selected three smaller activities to complete.

Firstly, we looked at these beautiful pictures by Rett Grayson. I talked through the process with the children and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. We drew the grid first and drew the circle using a bowl as a stencil. They could then choose whether they wanted the tree or the background to be warm/cool colours.

We created two-way pictures in the second lesson. I took pictures of the children making two different faces, one in front of a red background and one in front of a blue background. Depending on the angle, the picture would change between the two faces. Unfortunately, I can't post our results because it's all pictures of the class but they were very impressed and proud!

Finally, we made corner bookmarks much like these that I've posted before. This time, we followed this excellent youtube tutorial. I preferred this because all it needed was square paper and some folding (no scissors!). I put a help-sheet on each table with lots of examples of corner bookmarks. Children could use those as inspiration or come up with their own original idea. This was probably my favourite of the 3 projects because everyone was successful and couldn't wait to start reading!