Story-telling. Art, writing and drama project.
Year two love a cross-curricular project! In term 5, we delivered a story-telling project combining art, writing and drama. The over-arching topic for the term was Indonesia and both art lessons and writing lessons used the country and its culture as inspiration.
We began by exploring images, films, colours and sounds of different aspects of Indonesia. The children then chose photographs which they used as a starting point for their painting and drawing within their sketchbooks. They were given four sections to draw in (a storyboard) and the pupils began to consider the sequence of events and happenings within their stories. This was by no means the finished article. I then handed over the project to Mrs. Dennett and Mrs. Amelia:
After creating our story sketchbooks in art, we began to think about how we could transform our pictures into a story. The children began by using drama to act out their ideas with the sketchbooks acting as a storyboard. Within the drama lesson, freeze frames were used to encourage the children to share different ideas on how characters were feeling, as well as using their senses to describe the setting. On returning to the classroom the children added key words or phrases to the top part of their story sketchbooks which they felt would be useful when planning their story in more detail. In our next session, using a story mountain, the children drew pictures to show their ideas in more detail. They carefully considered the beginning, build up, problem, resolution and ending. Our last session was the most exciting part - time to write their story! The children used all their ideas to write a creative and imaginative story. We were so impressed with the use of children’s interesting vocabulary to describe different parts of their story. Please view the first of our galleries below:
As part of the art project, the children also imagined being on a sailing ship travelling to Indonesia. After an introduction to the work of J. M. W. Turner, we had a great lesson spraying the children with water and watching films of ships at sea. They used mixed-media (oil pastels and watercolour paint) to create expressive images of the sea while listening to ‘Four Sea Interludes’ by Benjamin Britten. Please see some examples in the gallery below:
