July’s Artist of the Month is Claude Monet – a French artist who founded the Impressionist movement. Our Toddler and Pre-School room have used a variety of media to recreate Monet’s masterpiece ‘Water Lilies’ by using real flowers and pinecones to recreate the textures of the painting and life like imagery of the water. Fine tipped cotton buds were also available for children who wanted to make smaller marks and create their picture with more precision. These activities enhanced the children’s knowledge of the ways different materials can be used. To extend this further they explored how pastel paints can be altered allowing them to improve their hand-eye co-ordination and fine manipulative skills to reflect Monet’s work.
Over the course of July, the children have also explored making 3-dimensional interpretations of Monet’s work as well as identifying the difference in textures between the use of watercolours, pastels, brushes, cones and some children even used their fingers to create the patters in their artwork. The use of varied tools has promoted many discussions of texture, patterns and colour mixing whilst encouraging children to experiment and make predictions of their work.
Carrying on the French theme we also celebrated Bastille Day by learning some French words, making some delicious pain au chocolat and using junk modelling to build the Eiffel Tower.