Session 2 – Friday 24 January » Kids' Own

OK so I have solutions to some of the mysteries of last week – ~ –

I thought there was a group called The Ravens and another called Rapunzel’s Tyre ~ when actually the Reds and Rapuncel’s Tower make much more sense. I was getting very lost in the woods with the chirping bird and the lovely Belfast accent kept sending up the wrong path. [The Red Hot Chille Peppers The Rolling Stones and the Explosions had all come across without due mishap.]

I got a little tip from Ann Donnelly, the artist who is working at Donaghey PS – she has a magic paper that she made with her class, with everyone’s names and faces on it

So today we began by coming one by one to the webcam and I took a snapshot and each person signed their name to their face, faces were grouped together on the whiteboard and we typed the group name into a text box.

REDS ~Luke~Orla~Kate~Luke
DYNAMITES ~Cara~Jacob~Daire~Erin
RED HOT CHILLE PEPPERS ~Ellie~Lewis~Wiktoria~Hannah
EXPLOSIONS ~Maria~Caolan~Rhiannon~Eimear
RAPUNCEL’S TOWER ~Sarah Marie~Rachael~Caitlin~Niamh
ROLLING STONES ~Jacob~Luca~Jamie

As it happens this tuned right in with our work today with fractals.

The photos took some time (especially as we kept losing our connection) So while we were taking snapshots at the webcam the class were busy behind the scenes folding triangles again and again, we counted 40 at one point but I think we folded more…we were looking at

Sierpinski’s fractal – I got this image from wikipedia:

We noticed, as we folded our triangle up to the previous fold lines, that the triangles were all equilaterals and they were getting smaller and smaller.

Do you remember how many triangles we counted in the last one?

We noticed that in the Sierpinski Triangle the white triangles point down and the black triangles point up

We noticed that the triangle in the middle stayed big after the first iteration [an iteration is a repeated action] Can you see how this rule is repeated with each iteration?

I asked if anyone knew what a fractal was and one boy (please say here who?) told us that a fractal is a shape which stays the same whether it gets smaller or bigger …..

here is another example from wikipedia showing how fractals talk about scale:

$Animated_fractal_mountain$

[…or how a triangle can be a mountain…you might have to click on the triangle to see it transform and multiply…]

Everyone agreed to work on their own Sierpinski triangle during the week, choosing colours and creating the design.

So now all of this was all very ordered and systematic, so I wanted to find out what the opposite might be ~ the class came up with words like disordered and chaos…

I showed the group a drawing I did by making a random scattering of points and connecting the points into triangles. The children made a point for each one of us (24 children + Mr Boyle + Julie) in random places on a page in their sketch books.

It would be good to come up with other ways of creating random patterns

The children noticed that in my drawing there were lots of different shades. We talked about how to make different tones ~ the children suggested using pressure on the pencil and by crosshatching…I also suggested we think about layers ~ crosshatching is one way of building layers to create different tones and we can build tone by layers of shading too. Here is our whiteboard discussion and some drawings

I showed them some other pages in my sketch book:

The children thought this one looked like an amethyst –

We decided to try some colour work using different tones and colours (hues):

Can you think about how to create different colours using layers?

We can try more work with this next week…(or the week after)

meantime we also thought about fractals and scale

After all that work I asked if you would like to see my studio. I have been busy growing crystals:

These ones are made out of sugar and cochineal.

The children have collected jam jars and are going to start growing some in the classroom…on Monday…they will take a photo every day to document how the crystals form. We will look at these in more detail next week.

STUDIO