English
In English, we celebrated World Shakespeare Day by looking at summaries of his plays in order to find out more about what themes and topics interested him. There was a lot of death! We created freeze frames of the end of each play, so we could see who the main characters were in each play and what happened to them. The plays all ended with people dying, sometimes being killed in a fight or sometimes being caught up in horrible misunderstandings. These plays were very dramatic. We know what to expect at the end of Macbeth now!
Art
This week we started our new art project – Painting the World of Macbeth.
In Shakespearean times, theatres did not have scenery like they do today, so Shakespeare’s plays are full of lovely descriptive writing. We are using words from the opening of the play to inspire us with our painting:
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun.
Where the place?
Upon the heath.
There to meet with Macbeth.
ALL Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
We practised different painting and mark making techniques separately, and then layered them to produce a composite picture of colour wash, wax relief and graphite. We used limited colour palettes to create a stormy, gloomy atmosphere, although some children added some symbolic blood red!
Next week we will be using these techniques to create our own formally composed storm images.
