Charles and Janine Williams - exploring art

At the end of this term Bairds Mainfreight will be holding it's 2016 Art exhibition. The theme this year is 'New Zealand Artists'.

In Room 8 we have chosen to base our art around the work done by Charles and Janine Williams. They are a husband and wife team who grew up and live in South Auckland. Their artwork can be called 'urban, Pacific, contemporary art' and they are inspired by their environment, their Māori culture and their love of native birds.

You may have spotted these around our community. They were created as part of the Otara Roller Door Project:

 

 Yesterday we started to explore what symbols were and how and why artist use them in their work. 

In small groups we viewed pieces of art and discussed

• What do we like about this piece of art?
• What do we find interesting?
• Has the artist used symbols? If so what do we think they mean?

Here is what some of us said.....

"I like the different colours they used on the bird." Carlito
"The stairway part looks a stairway to heaven." Jena
"We think that the 3 small triangles may represent home." Carlito
"And it means being safe." Hayden
"The big triangle looks like a tent." Jena 

"I like how it looks like the birds might be really holding on to the lines." Gwyneth
"I like the detail on the bird, how they have blended it. They didn't just use normal colours, and they shaded it too." Tarita
"It feels like I could pick the stick up." Tarita
"I like the background, how they blended all the colours into a mess. A good mess." Micheal

"I like the patterns connecting to each other." Augustina
"I think the Māori symbols mean Mum, Dad, son, daughter, baby. Like a family." Ardyn
"I like the way they designed it and I like the birds." David
"That big bird might be the mother." Tarita
"Or the leader." TeAo


We are excited to start learning more about symbolism in art, and creating symbols to use in our own art.

Duffy Award

Micheal won the Duffy award at assembly today! Micheal is a creative thinker who came up with some fantastic examples of powerful verbs this week during writing. 

Keep up the great learning Micheal :)

Gwyneth turned 9 today! 

  Happy Birthday to yooooooooou!

We hope you had a great day Gwyneth and a big thank you to Mum and Dad for the delicious cupcakes. 

 

Waina is a star!

We have a star in Room 8!! Well we actually have MANY stars in Room 8, but this week the super clever Waina was featured in the New Zealand Herald alongside her awesome dad Wayne. 

Waina is a dedicated member of Sistema who plays the violin.
We are VERY proud of you Waina and of Ellen-Gracie, Tarita, Augustina, Micheal, and Amy who are also part of Sistema.

What an inspiration you are to us all!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11594999

Happy Birthday Amy

Happy birthday beautiful Amy who is 9 today! Thank you to Ellen-Gracie for your lovely version of 'Happy Birthday' played on the cello.

Bio Poetry

Yay! We have finally finished our bio poems! They look great and it was a good way to learn more about each other.

Unfortunately you can't read the poems on the video.....so please pop into Room 8 to check them out :)

Metaphors

As part of our focus on poetry, today we were learning about metaphors. A metaphor is when we compare a person, place or thing to something else. It's different from a simile, as we don't use the words 'like' or 'as'.

Writers use metaphors in their poetry for many reasons.

• To make the writing more interesting
• To make a clearer picture in the readers mind
• To make the reader use their imagination and really think about what they are reading 
• Because they can be funny!

We worked with a buddy to google an interesting image of the sky, then we had to create a metaphor about the image. Our writing had to:

• Have a capital letter and full stop
• Be a metaphor that used the words 'is' or 'was'
• Make sense!

We had to open a word document, copy and paste an image, change the layout, font and colour - so we were learning lots of computer skills too!

 This is what we came up with this morning.......