It was a long break since we had met with a real visit at the start of Dec and our second session, which was a planned online connection, unfortunately did not go as we had planned… our connection was hampered and had to be abandoned. However Teacher Dearbhla continued with the activities that we had hoped to do together.
Our theme is INTERPRET which was briefly introduced to the children on the real visit, but I had wanted to re-visit this word and talk about what it means….. It is wide open!
INTERPRET = to take to mean something….. translate something…. represent something and so on….
However we wanted to try a little experiment in INTERPRETING, where I ask the children to break into pairs and sit back to back, so they are not looking at each other… one child puts on a blindfold.
Teacher Dearbhla gives each blindfolded child a small object that they have to feel and describe to their friend behind them! The person with the blindfold is relying on their sense of touch to describe the object to their friend. They can say “its hard”; “its round” etc but not what they think it is! They are giving a set of clues. The child behind them has to use that information to draw the object. i am looking forward to seeing some of the pictures from this experiment!
Dearbhla continued with another activity which was to try to draw a tree from memory only. The children did this (Dearbhla closed the curtains so that no trees could be seen outside the window! St Patrick’s in Crossmaglen has beautiful trees and grounds around the school!). After this was done, the children put on their coats and went outside to see the tree close-hand and touch the bark and branches etc. They came back and drew the tree from the window position.
We got UNSTUCK with our connection later in the week and used facetime to talk to each other and the children showed me their drawings of the trees from memory and then from actual experience of the tree. We look forward to uploading these soon.
It was so lovely to see the images full of life and energy!
Here are a few INTERPRETATIONS of trees painted by artists.
