Blossom Nursery Art Class Newsletter November 2011 Dear Parents, Please let me introduce myself: my name is Julie Dalloz and I am the Art Teacher in both Blossom Nursery and Blossom Village for the toddlers and preschool children. Every two months, I would like to give you an overview of what kind of creativity your child is exposed to during my specialized art classes. Every week, you will find his/her artwork in the Smartbook with an explanation of what we have been doing or the artwork will be hung up in the nursery if it is a group work so please do keep an eye out for them! In September and October, we created some art pieces inspired by the topics of the British Curriculum and Skygarden: 1. Welcome to Blossom 2. The 5 senses During the first topic “Welcome to Blossom”, we explored different textured papers with our funky paper collage, using crepe and tissue paper, foil, lace, colourful cardboard paper...etc. Then we created our own classroom signs, painting on an oval canvas and decorating with glitter and the photos of our faces. That allowed us to learn how to work together as a team and how to share our ideas. Next, we covered the theme “Being a nice person” by working on the concept of sharing, with two children working on the same artwork, using newspapers and drawing some graphic lines (see below). It was actually not an easy task for everyone to share our art pieces! We next created a masterpiece for Halloween where all the classes from both Blossom branches participated. It was a great fun and the children were very proud of that eerie landscape. Afterwards, we celebrated the birth of Picasso by getting inspired by two of his famous paintings : “The Dove of peace” with the toddlers and “Punchinello with a guitar” with the preschoolers. We used the collage technique with different papers and fabrics, glitter, stickers, looking at the different shapes that we could find in (see below). And for the anecdote, when I asked Anthony in the Blue Birds class if he had ever heard of Picasso, he answered: “No, I don’ t know Picasso but I know Spider Man!!!”. So cute!