Inspired by the Northern Lights, also called Aurora Borealis, students created some beautiful artwork that showcases the dancing colours of the night sky (see video below).

Fun Facts about the Northern Lights:

• Earth isn’t the only planet to have auroras — scientists have found them on Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
• The northern lights don’t just produce beautiful colours, they also make sounds like claps, crackles and static. But these are hard to hear with all the other noise around us.
• The most common colours of the northern lights are green, pink, purple, red, yellow and blue.
• The northern lights appear 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth and are bright enough to be seen from space.

Click here to learn how the Northern Lights are formed and other neat information about them.

Did you know…

The name “aurora borealis” comes from the French astronomer and scientist Pierre Gassendi. He called it aurora for the Roman goddess of the dawn, and boreas, which is the Greek word for the north wind.

I don’t think anyone can argue that puppets are so much fun. They stimulate children’s imaginations and allow children to engage in creative play. They are a great way to motivate children and to explore ideas and topics in fun and exciting ways.

I’ve collected puppets for many years and have always had a fondness for them. When living in Thailand, I was treated a couple of times to the Joe Louis Puppet Theatre. Check out the video below to get an idea of how puppets are used on stage:

There are so many different types of puppetry including:

• shadow puppets
• finger puppets
• stick puppets
• paper bag puppets
• sock puppets
• marionette
• whole body puppet

We are beginning to explore puppetry in our own classroom. We have started with these simple googly eye puppets that sit on our finger. We are experimenting with different hand positions, movements, and even voices.

We watched Oobi and Uma and gathered some ideas about how to hold our hands and move our arm and wrist. Check it out!

Finally, we raided Mrs. Sullivan’s puppet box and tried out various types of puppets with our classmates.

Do you like puppets? What kind of puppet do you like?

60% of how we express ourselves is through the body, 30% is the tone of voice, and only the last 10% is what you say says Mark Hill, a physical theatre artist and a famous visiting educator at International Schools around the world.

In Drama, students have recently presented their mirror image skits which involved expressing themselves through movement. They have done a lot of preparing, practicing, and planning with their partners. Each partnership created the context for their performance, whether that be waking up in the morning, going to a pool, or going to a movie theatre. Ideas were very diverse! It was a lot of fun to watch the performances and witness the synchronicity and calculated movements the partnerships made. Awesome!

On Tuesday, the Grade 3s made the visit to Museum London. We split into 2 groups and toured the various galleries, learning about local artists such as Merle “Ting” Tingley as well as other Canadian artists.

Merle Tingley “Ting”

We talked about ideas such as the elements of design, mood, inspiration, symmetry, movement, and much more.

After our tour, we enjoyed creating a piece of mixed media art. It was a Fall scene involving the changing colours of leaves on trees. We used a variety of media including paper, paint, string. Using cool colours–a blue and green wash, we created the sky and ground. Trees were created using torn pages from a book and the leaves were painted on using warm colours.

Have a look at the process and our finished pieces!