The Arts

In Autahi in the last few weeks we have been exploring the arts in many ways.  We have been exploring weaving, painting, self portraits and music-making.  

Some of us worked on a multiple step self portrait process.  We used mirrors and looked carefully at the shapes of our faces, eyes, noses, ears and the rest of our faces and drew what we were seeing.  We mixed paint to try to make a colour close to our skin.  We used water colours to paint our hair, lips and eyes.  We mixed paint and played with texture to make our backgrounds. And we stuck our faces onto the backgrounds. 

  

Here are some of the finished products!

 

 

We have been exploring weaving.  We have been noticing the pattern you have to follow when you weave and we have been learning about how Maori used weaving to create kete, shelters and garments. 

    

In Music we have been exploring how we can make different sounds with instruments, our bodies and things we can find around us.  This week we went on a nature hunt and created a nature orchestra.

Here we are gathering things we can use as instruments.

 

Have a listen to some of our nature music!

Have a listen to some of our music that we've been playing during Discovery!

We've been exploring with the instruments and practising our singing! 

Stay tuned to hear and see more of our wonderful art!

Positive Emotions

One part of the Positive Education model that we have been focussing on this week is Positive Emotions.  This domain is about experiencing a broad range of positive emotions and developing skills and knowledge to anticipate, initiate, prolong and build positive emotions.  

In order to do this, we first need to be able to identify emotions.  We have been working this week on identifying emotions, looking at how our faces change when we feel certain ways, playing with colours and what emotion each colour evokes and role playing a little bit by stepping into someone else's shoes in different scenarios. 

We read the book In My Heart.  A Book of Feelings By Jo Wilek and we began exploring feelings. 

We explored colour mixing and thought about what feelings the different colours made us think of.  Some of the feelings we came up with were: hopeful, happy, excited, sleepy, angry and peaceful.  

We also looked in the mirror, made faces and drew self portraits. 

Doing this exercise will help us to recognise when others are feeling certain ways.  When we can recognise our emotions we can tend to them better.  When we can look after ourselves we tend to feel better and the better we feel, the better we do.  So our aim is to be able to identify our emotions, recognise that sometimes we have negative emotions and this is normal and try to do things that help us to feel positive emotions.  

These activities filled us with positive emotions!