“Colours, like features, follow the changes of the emotions” - Pablo Picasso

An interesting Art lesson yesterday.  As well as an opportunity to work with and get to know a number of different people on the course, I particularly enjoyed the casual blend of theory, discussion and practical work.

The notion that particularly struck me was the fact that art doesn't always have to be an activity tacked on to another subject: 
Literacy: write a story and then draw a picture to go with with it.
Guided Reading: pick a character from the story; draw and then annotate the picture.
Science: make a poster.
Etc...

Art can be proactively used in a cross curricular manner, e.g. ask the children what are their favourite colours, encourage them to play with colour and express it in some format.  Then go on to use the pieces they produce to inspire a piece of writing - perhaps a colour poem?

I have seen a lot of occasions where art was used cross curricularly in a reactive manner, but I cannot recall even one occasion where I have seen it used proactively.  I think that this is definitely something that I could try to include into my own teaching.

We also created our own artwork inspired by some famous images.  My group had Picasso's Night Fishing at Antibes (1939):

And this is what we created:

I thought everyone in the group had created some very interesting pieces and the notion of 'being good at art' never came into it - it was all about individual expression: