origami

As part of the Literacy unit on 'instructions' the y3 children have been creating origami pieces. These are my 'here's one I made earlier' and are all made from a very similar set of folds - in fact the tiger and polar bear are identical right up to the colouring in stage. 

 

All of them were made from a square piece of copy paper. The 'Pudsey' (Bottom pic - right) is in anticipation of 'Children in Need' on Friday.

xmas cards

In between giving a mini xmas concert (cornets, clarinets) to the rest of school + parents, we had a go at making some crimble cards today. We stitched and origami'd various designs.

Pinhole cameras

My job has slightly changed and I no longer cover most of the art in school. I'm now in a y3 class full time, but will endeavour to squeeze in as many creative oppportunities as possible. Today for instance we started a science unit on Light & Shadow so by way of an introduction to light and its properties I decided to follow up the origami boxes from last term by making pinhole cameras - using exactly the same origami techniques! We made one box from a piece of A5 black sugar paper and one, slightly smaller out of tracing paper. The second one fits inside the first and hey presto, one small pin hole in the black box and you have a functioning pinhole camera. You get fairly decent images on the tracing paper screen - good enough to realise that the image is upside down and reversed (will lead us into looking at the structure of the eye). The whole thing can be improved by making a small black paper 'hood' to shield the screen. The children were amazed to realise that a functioning camera could be made from just two pieces of paper. Lets hope they're just as fascinated with the (simple) explanation of how it works!

Santa

As a way or rounding off the little origami project we've been doing in Y3 (boxes/packaging) we folded some Santa's and stuck them to cards.

Origami tree

In Y3 we rounded off our origami endeavours by folding successively smaller pieces of paper into star baskets - and arranged them in a Christmas tree sort of way. We thought about putting small treats in the different boxes and using them as table decorations. We even contemplated making an advent type arrangement but decided we would need to start off with very large pieces of paper for the bottom boxes.

We have also started to paint our Boxosaurus. First an undercoat of green...

origami

Y3 have been busy learning the gentle art of origami and have made simple boxes to tie in with their science topic on materials combined with a Design Technology unit on packaging.

At school we also run an arts & crafts enterprise club, where we produce items that we then sell on to pupils and parents. We have been busy making Christmas cards using stitches and buttons.