Arctic explorations

Today we carried on from our field trip at the Glenbow with some Inuit inspired art.  Printmaking is a form of art which is currently very popular in the Arctic, especially in the Cape Dorsett area.  The Inuit people have been carving bones, and tusks for thousands of years, but have only been introduced to print making since around the 50s.   Inuit prints often depict their daily life or arctic animals. 

Our class created a monoprint to represent Arctic culture. We created a reduction style art block made from Styrofoam.  The art block can be used repeatedly, however a monoprint is a single impression made from a reprintable block.

We also looked at other artists like Andy Warhol, who use the concept of repetition, printing an image multiple times.  In this picture, Warhol has repeated an IDENTICAL image of his face only altering the colours.   

We also added some different shaped rocks to our inukshuk centre.  The children found the first set of rocks challenging to build with.  The new rocks were described as flatter and thinner and easier to stack.  

During Montessori work period and morning meeting we have been talking about the characteristics of shapes.  Children are noticing attributes like:

-the number of sides

-the number of corners

-the length of sides (all sides are the same length in regular polygons) 

-the types of angles (acute, obtuse, right-angled)

-the relationships between the sides (parallel sides, divergent lines)

During our explorations we are less worried with remembering the names of particular shapes, but learning the concept that shapes can be described by their attributes.  

Kids are making interesting discoveries, that shapes can have more than one name. 

For example a square can be called many things.  It is: 

-a rectangle

-a quadrilateral

-a four sided figure

-a polygon

-parallelogram.... 

For some kids a square is a square, because it has four sides. For others, they are also deciding it is because all the corners have right angles.  Others have noticed that all its sides are the same length.  The closer children examine the shapes, they discover the attributes that make it different from other shapes.  (A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square because its sides are not all the same length).  What shapes are around your house? What do you notice about them?