Creating Rangoli

As part of our Diwali celebrations, we created rangoli! Rangoli is a traditional art that is created with coloured rice, sand or flour. Hindu's create rangoli during Diwali to welcome deities into their home. Often times rangoli designs are geometric or in the shapes of flowers.

The first step we took in making our rangoli was to talk about what rangoli is and what it looks like. We looked at pictures of rangoli on the overhead lcd projector.

We talked about the colours, shapes, and information about why they are made and how they are made. The next day we brought in salt, chalk and cookie sheets and started our own rangoli designs.

The first step was to colour the salt to get vibrant and beautiful colours.

Colouring the salt with chalk to give it a nice colour.

After we had a variety of colours of salt, we drew designs on paper with a pencil, went over the pencil lines with glue, and added pinches of the colours we wanted on our designs.

Starting to add colours to a beautiful flower design.

Two stages--- Mrs. Walt pinching salt onto her flower, a boy drawing his picture and another boy just starting his chalk.

We had so much fun creating beautiful designs! Some friends have taken them home, and others are displayed at school. Check back later today for pictures of some of our rangoli art.

Happy weekend!

An Artistic Type of Day

Today Mrs. Saini and I decided to put out Halloween themed stamps and paint at the messy table. Out came the paper! Out came the stamps! Out came a completely new direction to our plans!

Within minutes of digging in we had:

String art....

Look at the experiments with symmetry!

Finger painting...

Colour mixing, writing and general fun!

Stamping....

Exploring the correct amount of paint to put on the stamp. Too much paint made globby pictures.

And although there are no pictures, there were colour mixing activities occuring in the sink after messy hands were washed off. How they used the paint was fantastic. In the end, we talked about symmetry, patterning, directionality, sensory experiences, colours, letters, writing, and more.

So of course, I turned around and, my goodness, there were art activities being explored all over the room! At the creative centre we had a student exploring hole punches...

Super strength to push that punch!

Someone else was drawing a lovely picture with our markers...

Scary costume!

And someone else was writing a letter to Mr. McCutcheon...

Mr. McCutcheon is going to have a lot of writing to do!

At the creative centre we were exploring writing, communication, pencil grips, telling stories with pictures, counting shapes, developing hand muscles, exploring colour and sharing.



Finally, our builders were hard at work preparing our drama centre. On Monday we are making it into a PetsMart. A few boys were working hard to ensure that it was "fixed" and ready for the pets. Stay tuned to see our drama centre come into fruition!