Back in the classroom after the story-telling/drama session in the hall, Tony reminded the class of their keyword UNITY and what they had already learnt about symbols.

They had seen a lot of symbols on their key object the Bwa plank mask when they had visited the Horniman Museum and printed UNITY symbols on their UNITY banner on the introduction day.

Then the pupils explored the idea of signs -
What are they?
Why create signs?
They also talked about the difference between man made and natural objects and phenomenom and thought of lots of examples which were written up on the board.

Natural:

moon, sun, stars, trees, roots, leaves, mud, human beings, flowers, water, clouds, lightening, animals, coal, gas, oxygen, birds, sand, potatoes, silk

Man Made:

letter-box, litter, paper/wood, plastic, furniture, clothes, wool, bricks, toys, shoes/leather, glass, ink, paint, food, trains, factories, buttons, wax, houses, cardboard

We discussed how the two elements can work in unity - man and nature...wind in sails, water for power, etc. and we looked at the way symbols develop and are read universally, how they cross language and literacy boundries (see also the literacy page).

Next the class was divided into two - man made and natural - and each child chose an object to draw. These individual drawings were simplified into signs and symbols and then cut out of black paper and scanned onto the computer where they were resized ready to be coloured in in Paint. They changed from symbols to patterns when REPEATED or tiled as backgrounds. See the computer work.

Following on from this, the class worked again on their symbol shapes, further simplifiying them or aspects of them. These shapes would form the basis of their screen printing.

After discussing patterns and abstraction, they then cut out a few of their shapes on white paper, some of different sizes, and laid them onto black card to work out their final design before the screen printing commenced.

Click here to see the screen printing

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