Picasso

Nellie the Elephant

~ Kate Wilson ~ 2 Comments
Picasso Week at the Summer School

We were going to work on circus things. I tried to think of an English song to teach.
What about Nellie the Elephant?
And so the show began to take shape and in the end Nellie was the star!

Or one of them. Here is one little tiny student who walked on the red ball – The Ball Of Fire!!! – all the way to the trapeze and then amazed everyone with her high flying act
Picasso made plates at one stage of his life so we did too

And everyone managed to sing Nellie the Elephant in English while wheeling her around in a final parade as she said goodbye to the circus and trundled back to the jungle!

Picasso now

~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments

This week we are ‘doing’ Picasso in the summer school. It neatly fits in with the circus activities as Picasso often painted clowns and travelling circus people in his early work.
Before I write about the art work I just want to say what fun it was to do an introductory clown class. We had to imagine our eyes on the ends of our noses and walk around the room, looking with our noses. It makes a huge difference to how you walk!
Then we walked one by one across the room, as normally as you can when a group of children are watching you.  After deciding what stood out most about our way of walking, we then copied and exaggerated it. This class only lasted about 10 minutes as the group was suffering from an attack of Attention Deficit Syndrome but I could have done it all day.

We tried out doing Picasso portraits of each other.  If you fancy playing around with this I also found a great web site where you can make Picasso Heads.