Nim's Island

In P5 the students are doing a novel study around Nim's Island. As a result we are completing art projects with this theme too.

We started off recreating a piece of volcano art which I discovered on pinterest, but later that week I watched a TED Talk by Cindy Foley about creativity and thinking like an artist. I realised that the volcano art we were doing in class was teaching the students about artistic techniques but not encouraging or utilising the students creativity.



In light of watching this video I decided to come at the art lessons from a different approach and asked the students to think of ideas that they could do to create art around the Nim's Island theme.

The responses from the students surprised me and I enjoyed seeing the different ideas that the students had come up with.

After reading the results from the children there were a lot which talked about paper mache, making Nim's hut and creating life-size pictures of the characters.  So I decided to let the students do all of these activities.

I prepared the resources the students required and let them choose which activity they wanted to do. Now the students in my art class were coming up with the ideas for their art lesson and then choosing which activity they most prefer out of a selection. Until the school holidays we are working on our paper mache islands and our life-size Nim's. The students are being given freedom in their art to use their imagination and creativity - this is actually a requirement in their work, and are also having to problem solve how to use the materials to achieve the result they want.