We started the week by looking at the poem ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten me at all’ by Maya Angelou. We started by matching the poem’s lines with the artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiet and then arranged them in the order we thought they would be in. Following this, we started to learn the poem by doing different actions we worked on our voice projection and applying emphasis on certain lines. Throughout the rest of the day, we practised our samba piece as well as creating our own Jackson Pollock inspired pieces.

On Tuesday, we spent our first day in the art studio with Mrs Johnston. We started by sketching our own self portraits and learnt lots of top tips on where our different features appear on our faces. After we created our initial sketches, we used watercolours to add the different tones to our faces. Although we found it difficult to begin with, we showed our resilience to create some great pieces. 

Miss Patchett worked with us to begin choreographing a dance performance. Again, we struggled to grasp some of the more complex dance movements but following some practice (at home as well) we ended Thursdays dance lesson much more confident. 

We also learnt about the poetry style known as kennings which combines two nouns per line to create some really imaginative pieces. We wrote poems about different fears we might have. Special mention to Grayson who wrote an excellent kenning about nightmares: 

Mind-controller                             

Brain-biter

Night-lover

Fear-planter

We ended the week in the studio learning about the poem ‘Caged Birds’ by Maya Angelou. We talked about how sometimes our fears and worries can cage our dreams. We then created our own bird templates using the book ‘Migration’ as a stimulus. We also finished off our Jackson Pollock pieces by adding our kennings using newspaper. We really enjoyed the process and hope you enjoy them as well.