Year 5 – Autumn Term
Year 5 enjoyed exploring several areas of art and design in the Autumn term.
As part of our Tudor topic, we visited the Tudor Gallery in the National Portrait Museum. The children were able to explore some of the most famous paintings of that epoch. They learnt that Kings and Queens had to project an image of themselves to look powerful, and therefore – just as many people do today – chose to manipulate their paintings to support the message they were trying to convey. With this in mind, children had to study three paintings of Elizabeth I to decide ‘Which was the most Elizabeth of the Elizabeths?’
They also learnt about a medieval form of copying pictures, called pouncing whereby the artist would puncture holes around an outline of a drawing and rub charcoal dust over it with a new liner/paper underneath so that the charcoal would mark the paper underneath. The children saw how this had been done to one of the Henry VIII paintings. In class, the children had their own go at copying using this technique, of a painting of Henry VIII.
During our topic called Princes, Peasants and Pestilence, the children enjoyed making medieval books by selecting and combining different materials. They learnt about Illuminating letters, which would often be used at the start of handwritten texts. The children had a go at designing their own ones, using the letter at the start of their names. They looked amazing! Our last DT project for this topic was to create our own ‘printing presses’, inspired by the work of William Caxton. The children designed wintery scenes using string stuck on cardboard sheets then repeatedly painting and pressing these onto paper to give a repeated pattern. This worked similarly by pressing hard into foam sheets to create an imprint, and again painting these and pressing them onto paper to give a different form of repeated pattern. The outcomes of this have been fantastic and are now on display outside our classrooms!
