Autahi's Centennial Reserve adventure

We are so fortunate that the location of our school makes it easy for us to find different ways to connect with the natural world. The beach of often our go-to, but we also have areas of regenerating bush nearby, such as Centennial Reserve.

This week, on a beautiful, sunny day, we headed off for our walk to the Reserve. The walk there and back is always a good challenge, with plenty of opportunities to use our Perseverance to 'keep going' all the way.

When we got under the shade of the trees, we found that the replanting of the ngahere is really making a difference, with much thicker bush and plenty of birds to see and hear, including some boisterous tūī and pīwakawaka flitting about. As we ate a well-earned morning tea, there was also a chance to try some kawakawa tea while sitting amongst the kawakawa bushes.

Then, we had plenty of time to explore and appreciate the ngahere, noticing the plantlife, birds and also little bugs and beetles. At our recent Whānau Days, we have learnt some ways to use drawing and mark-making to notice and appreciate the places we love. We used the rubbing technique we practised with Fiona to capture some textures and leaf shapes that we found.

Reflecting on our time at the Reserve, we agreed that it was exciting but also made us feel calm and relaxed. The bush worked its magic on us. We're sure to return there soon for more adventures.

Building our artist's toolkit.

In Autahi, Creativity is a Character Strength that we see on a daily basis. Our children are never short of ideas for things they would like to make, build and draw. Our role is often to provide opportunities for all our students to develop specific art skills that they will be able to use to enhance their creations. We are also keen to make sure that everybody, wherever they are in their development as an artist, has a chance to create art that is fun to make and satisfying to look at.

Our latest project in Autahi takes inspiration from Kandinsky's Circles. Our artists' first challenge was to draw the concentric circles that form the basis of their art piece. Drawing large circles is tricky! We practised on our whiteboards and then, when we felt ready, used our soft sketching pencils to draw the circles on paper.

Once we had our circles, it was time to consider our colour choices. For this, we needed to use our artist's skill of observation. We looked at some photos of the bush and noticed the colours that were there - and those that were not. We created a colour pallet for our work by marking these on a colour chart.

Now, time to make our colours. We practised making the greens, browns and oranges that we needed by mixing together the primary colours of red, yellow and blue. Colour mixing takes practice, especially to achieve very specific shades.

Now time to paint! We had to be careful to keep inside the circle lines that we had drawn so that the layer by layer colour rings could be seen. We also had to make careful choices about colour combinations. 

We are pretty excited by how our art looks so far.

The next step will be to create a background for our circles and combine the individual panels.

Watch out for our finished art piece in Autahi soon!