Churwell STEAM Art Week
WOW what a week!
The STEAM theme for the year at Churwell Primary was ‘I am a musician’. The children had different specialists coming into the school to talk about music through to Science, Technology, English and Maths and I was asked to go in and explore the theme through Art.
I wanted to explore the theme from how music emotionally affects us through artistic methods. It quickly became a very fun and engaging subject.
I made a large wooden music box and hung pieces of card to the frame. Then we played music on a speaker and invited the kids to make marks to the sounds they heard. The music box was not for drawing pictures it was for mark making in relation to rhythm. We found correlations between the marks we made to rhythm and the principles of pattern. When the music was high we drew high, when it was low we went low, loud we made strong marks and when it was quiet me made light marks.
Year 1 made fantastic marks!
SUMMER
The Four Seasons is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives musical expression to a season of the year. The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works.
There are different sonnets in each season. Reception class, Year 1 and 2 all focussed on the Concerto No. 2 "Summer" Presto (in G minor) It sounds similar to a heavy summer rain storm.
Year 2 made stormy skies
We used paint pens, spray bottles, graphite and pens to make marks and show the rhythms of the music. High, low, quiet, loud, fast and slow were all represented in our marks as the song played.
Reception made grassy marks
We then composed those marks to make a landscape. The overall fell of the landscape feels like how the song sounds.
The composition is a view through trees of a storm in a field.
Vivaldi himself - looking amazing done by Levi and Gracie and Jack
Love this detail.
THE KRAKEN
Hans Zimmer is an Academy Award, Grammy, and Golden Globe award-winning film score composer. This particular musical score is from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest and is composed by Hans Zimmer.
Legends of the Kraken go back many years of seagoing mythology. The word "Kraken" was first heard in 12th-century Norwegian legends, referring to a creature the size of an island, and usually depicted as a giant squid. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest, the Kraken is sent to destroy the Black Pearl ship.
Kids wearing sleeping masks so they could just listened.
Year 3 and 4 made marks using graphite sticks to the sound of Hans Zimmers music. A Kraken shape was masked off using a stencil. The more marks we made around the stencil, the stronger the image of the Kraken became. We used rhythm, positive and negative space to create the image.
I don’t actually know how many legs a Kraken has so we kept adding them.
The marks intensified as the layers grew - the shapes formed by the mask and not deliberatly made.
BLACK BIRD
The Beatles formed in Liverpool in the 1960’s and are regarded as one of the most influential bands of all time.
The Black Bird song was written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1968. It is said to be inspired by bird song but it is also used symbolically to represent the struggles of the civil rights movement in America which was happening at the time.
The music video is by Year 5 and Nursery. We used the music box as a shadow puppet theatre and made black paper silhouettes. The video was played on a big screen in the hall at the exhibition.
‘Take your sunken eyes and learn to see’ lyrics illustrated by yr 5
SEEDS OF LOVE
The Seeds Of Love was released in 1989 and was written by Roland Orzabal, Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. It is a complex song touching on many themes and was written in the week of a general election.
Year 6 created a playful and imaginative representation of a Sunflower Seed Factory. We used some of the lyrics from the song to represent different departments within the factory that make the seeds of love. The installation is made with found objects, plasticine and miniature railway people as factory workers.
Tiny factory workers gave the work a sense of scale.
The arrows showed which way to go round the factory.
This is the love train riding coast to coast with the DJ driving it.
We had a gallery in the main hall where all there parents, governors, school principles were invite to attend. Needless to say, I was exhausted by the end.
Reflection:
What I loved most about the activity was that the kids were just being kids. It was playful and curious and fun. Just making marks with no preconceived ideas to music was just fun.
Also the Blackbird shadow play was just fun and the kids did really well in a short period of time to make something special even if it was just making shadows with their hands.
The Sunflower Seed factory was also playful but encouraged Y6 to make connections with symbols and lyrics.