book day & maths

Today, as it was World Book Day, I got our y4's to combine their love of books and Maths(!!). They used the shapes from a tangram to create book characters. They came up with lots of really inventive ones like these - Peter Rabbit & The Ugly Duckling.

mathARTmatics

As I'm still covering a colleague on long term sick leave it's difficult to have as much of an influence on art across the school as I would like. I've given out lesson plans/notes to each year group and try to suggest ideas that they can easily implement.

Y2 are currently looking at their local environment and we've already sketched the local town. To this end I've tried to sneak art into their maths curriculum and have created the good old standby of a drawing that has to coloured according to a key. Different colours have different values (white=15, blue=10 etc.) They look at a section, work out the sum and then colour it in accordingly. Et voila - a stylised, coloured representation of the town.

 

shapes

This week in Y3, it's shape! Again, trying to make it a little bit more creative, after the usual identification process, how many faces, edges, vertices etc., I gave them a quick tutorial on how to draw 3-D shapes. They were then let loose to see what wondrous images they came up with. (They had to annotate their pics to ensure it looked like they were doing some proper learning!)

This afternoon to tie in with Science ('Helping Plants Grow') and Literacy ('Wordplay'), we drew calligrams.

mathARTmatics

Did some fraction work in Numeracy (maths) this morning with my group. Rather than just the mind-numbingly boring writing down of answers to shaded in bits of circles we created pictures. Using the work of Ed Emberley (http://www.edemberley.com/) as an inspiration, we created birds, flowers etc - all the while recognising the fractional parts that went into making them.