ANZAC stories

I have been making an effort to put up lots of the children's stories in my classroom so that they can read their and each other's work.  We had ANZAC ceremonies at school last week and the children put out crosses to represent soldiers from the local area.  They wrote and illustrated stories about the experience and I was proud of the way they turned out.  The illustrations were done with crayon and dye.  

Paua drawings

 I was very proud of these paua drawings my class have been working on - I passed around a polished paua shell and got the class to notice things about the shell - the colours and patterns they could see, the texture and shape of the shell.  I then got them to draw the shell with pastel and outline details with black vivid.

They wrote a description of the paua shell and I got some of them to read their stories at our assembly.
I think the observational drawing we have been doing has been great for noticing objects carefully and has helped with thinking of adjectives in writing.  The paua inspired these pieces of writing:

Zentangle

For the last few weeks we have been doing a class swap once a week to get the children familiar with their classes for next year.  I have had a group of Year 3 children who are going on to the senior school this year.  They have had 3 1/2 hour sessions so I decided to get them to make some zentangle bugs.  This was the one I made as a model to demonstrate the technique and different kinds of patterns to use:

I was so impressed with the artwork they created in this short time:

I showed the early finishers a zentangle hand I had made to put in my relieving go-bag and they created their own, tracing around their hands:

A fun and effective way to explore patterning!