Year 3

Term 1

We started our topic by reading the first story in Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories which really got us hooked into the topic of Stone Age art. We thought about what it would be like to draw on cave walls and what the surface would feel like. We had an experimental lesson where we sat under the tables drawing upside down on the “roof”, on the walls etc and tried out lots of different materials and surfaces, including crumpling up paper to make it look old.

Then we looked at photos and videos about “Lion Man” (an ancient carved sculpture believed to be around 40,000 years old). We talked about how he was made and what we thought he was made out of. We recorded lots of drawings and thinking in our sketchbook and shared our thinking on the Working Window. Once we’d done some 2D work around Lion Man we then created sculptures of him using clay. We talked about how clay wouldn’t have lasted for 40,000 years if they’d used that instead of the mammoth’s tusk.

After that we experimented making the colour brown using primary colours. We looked at making tints (adding white) and shades (adding black) and we recorded this in our books. We also did some anatomy drawings of a woolly mammoth and talked about how some professions need to be able to draw bodies accurately.

Finally we stained some paper with tea and crumpled it up to make it look old. We looked back at the different techniques we had learnt and created our own cave art on our paper. We talked about composition and if we prefer one big drawing in the middle or several smaller ones. We talked to our peers and adults about our artwork and discussed what we enjoyed most about the process and also what we liked about the end result. Some of us talked about what went wrong and how we overcame these hurdles.

Term 2

In DT this term the children have been designing and making Christmas stockings. They started off by researching stockings and wrote their own design criteria, thinking about the qualities they needed the stockings to have such as big enough to hold little gifts, strong, no holes, attractive, Christmas themed etc. They also designed their stockings thinking about whether they wanted to have a Christmas tree, snowman or penguin.

Once they’d got a plan they drew around stocking templates using chalk on white felt. They used fabric scissors to cut out their stockings and then had to carefully sew around the edge of the stocking pieces. They then created the pictures that they wanted to go on their stocking and used fabric glue to stick the pieces together.

After that the children stuck the pictures onto the stockings and added “snow” to the top of the stocking. Some of the children were challenged to produce a white “toe” too. They also got to add sequins onto the stockings for extra decorations.

Finally the children added a little loop of ribbon which the stocking could be hung from and evaluated their stockings, referring back to their design criteria. Everyone was very proud of their stockings.