African Arts Week!

For arts week this year, Year 5 looked at African art.  

We decided not to do an African painting or sculpture, but to learn about African dance and singing. We learnt two children's songs which were famous songs from Ghana.

Then we put our dancing skills to the test and created an African tribe dance. First we watched a few videos to get some ideas. Our dance was fantastic and we had great fun practicing it and performing it to the rest of the school, who thoroughly enjoyed watching us! 

We also created some African cuffs and head bands to wear for our performance, using African beading as our inspiration.

Easter Celebration

Easter has arrived at White Mere. We are all ready for our parade this afternoon!

Eggstravaganza!

Just take a look at how creative y6 have been with their entries for White Mere's Easter egg competition. It's going to be really hard deciding on a winner.

Easter cards signal the arrival of Spring,

Y6 have made some beautiful Easter cards this week - many thanks go to Mrs Cutter for her awe inspiring design ideas!  

Easter bonnet competition.

Y6 have created some lovely Easter bonnets for our school competition - spring truly seems to have arrived along with much sunnier weather! (We hope it lasts)

Art inspired by William Morris

Y6 have recently studied artwork by the Victorian artist William Morris. Nature was a huge inspiration for Morris as is apparent within his many patterns. We extended one of his original designs to begin with in order to develop our sketching skills. We then designed a tile which we could use for a pattern of our own. Just look at our fantastic artwork!

Ancient Greek Art

We have had a very art driven couple of weeks in our creative curriculum topic. Firstly the children were given a homework task of creating terrifying Medusa masks from the Ancient Greek Myth of "Perseus And The Gorgons Head," the children worked really hard and the results were spectacular!

Later in the week and during the parent workshop the children of year 3 and year 4 decorated Ancient Greek pottery. After a very messy plaster lesson in class the children created their brilliant bowls which ended up looking fantastic.

Amazing Medusa masks.

Miss Sykes was so impressed by y3's creativity that she invited some pupils to show their amazing Medusa masks to the rest of the school in assembly. The rest of the school were certainly impressed. It's just as well that nobody was turned into stone!

Greek Bowls

We have been creating our plaster bowls ready for our parent workshop. They are looking fantastic!

Painting Flowers

We started our designs for Gateshead Flower Competision. In Year 4 we need to create paintings of flowers that represent our focus season which is Spring. We looked at a range of flower to help us plan our art work!

White Mere Advertisement Company

In Literacy this week Year 4 became their own advertisement company. We developed our own adverts for a range of products. We also developed our adverts further through our improvement sessions. We really enjoyed our class adverts!

Street child freeze frames!

Y6 have recently been studying Berlie Doherty's "Streetchild" as part of their narrative English unit. They really enjoyed recreating specific scenes from the book along with being in the hot seat as key characters.

Composition Time!

Today we continued our recorder compositions to include a harmony line. We have also started to practise our original compositions.

Advert Fun!

We have been looking at a range of adverts and thinking of questions we want to answer about these adverts. We thought about the images, characters, purpose and use of music in advertisements.

More Ancient Greece

As a final discovery with Durham University's outreach team, year 3 had the chance to design and create their own clay sculptures. These sculptures were used by the ancient Greeks when they had an illness or an injury. They would mould the clay or metal into the shape of their area of concern and then offer them up to the gods in the hope that they would be cured of their affliction.

Welcome to 2015!

It was our first week back at White Mere this week and after a brilliant holiday, all of year 3 are ready to get back to work. 

We began our return to school by researching our new topic, "Groovy Greeks". All of the children worked very hard over Christmas to learn as much as possible before we even came back and they produced some brilliant homework. 

We then continued by learning about key events that occurred in Ancient Greece.

Durham University Visit - Groovy Greeks

This week we have been lucky enough to be visited by our friends at Durham University. Paddy and John came long to show us Ancient Greek artifacts that we examined and discussed. We even got to wear real-life Greek helmets!