Christmas Bags

Christmas Art

In art this week we up-styled some bags for Christmas. We learned how to sew and decorated them with fabric and felt.  

History of Colour-The First Selfie??

This week, we learned more about how paint has been made through the centuries.  

A new fact we learned was that around 750 years ago, artists began mixing colours with oils to produce a glossy, slow drying paint. Known as oil paint, this soon became the most popular type because it let artists work more slowly.  The oil also made it possible to mix very thin, almost see-through colours, helping them to capture more subtle effects of light.

The picture we studied entitled, "Self Portrait in a Straw Hat", was painted around 1782 by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun using oil paints.  The artist has all the actual colours she used in her painting neatly set out on a wooden board or "palette".  This could be the first SELFIE?!

We set about recreating this painting using pastels. You can see which colours we used in the palettes on our pictures. 

Making Sugar Paint

On Friday in Art Class we learned how to make Sugar paint.
Ingredients:  
                     *Sugar
                     *Food Colouring
                     *Warm water

1. Mix 4 teaspoons of sugar with 4 teaspoons of water in a pot.
2. Keep the sugar and water mixture in the pot for few minutes until the sugar completely dissolves in the water. It takes about 2 minutes. Keep the heat very low. (We made the paint in a jug with boiling water and let it cool for two minutes-this worked just as well.)
3. Let the mixture cool.
4. Split the mixture to separate bowls and add the food colouring. (Be generous with the food colouring to get nice bright colours) Mix well.
5. Now your paint is ready to use. Have fun!

Science week

Our Erupting Volcano

For the next experiment we used fairy washing up liquid, vinegar, baking soda and red food colouring.

Meet our science team.

We made our volcano from clay.

We put a small jar inside it.

We added some washing up liquid.

We then added vinegar and red food colouring.

We added baking soda when we were ready for our volcano to erupt.

Here it goes!!

Our erupting volcano.