Invention in Art

Here are some of the things that we did, This Week In Gifted!

Field Trip!

It was been a tradition that the grade 3 - 5s in the Gifted Program go on a field trip in May that ties in with the year's theme.  This year our theme is Inventions and Inventors.  For our field trip we will be visiting the engineering labs at UBC-O in Kelowa on May 1st!  The students will be taken on a tour of selected labs and there will be some hands on activities too.  If your child is in grade 3, 4 or 5 they were given the field trip information sheet and permission form this week.  Please complete and return the forms as soon as possible.  If you need another copy of the info and forms please e-mail me and I will send them along (cthompson at summer dot com).

Below is a short video I showed the students to introduce the field trip.

Portraits in the style of Picasso

This week the Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon classes went back in time to visit Gertrude Stein in her salon in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.  There they heard about the various famous artists who used to gather there.  They also saw many of the paintings of Picasso focusing on his cubist work.  Below are the paintings that the students viewed.  They noticed that in Picasso's cubist paintings he used geometric shapes, showed objects from more than one view, and sometimes it was difficult to tell what some of the objects in the paintings were. 



After being introduced to Picasso's work, the students started working on a portrait in the cubist style (based on this post and the image in the final slide above).  Below are completed portraits from the Tuesday afternoon class.

My Favourite Things

The Tuesday morning and Thursday morning classes played a new game this week called 'My Favourite Things'.  Students in teams of 3 to 5 are given an object and then they each in turn have to tell the rest of the group why it is their favourite thing.  Students have to think on their feet, be creative and lateral thinking is encouraged.  Both classes did an excellent job, with students coming up with funny and creative stories!

Invention Project

The Tuesday morning class and both Thursday classes worked on their invention projects.  Students are either designing their own original invention or designing a program in Scratch.  Things are looking great!