Combining materials -EAD

[green hippo]

What do you look for to decided that children have moved on from using construction materials and being interested in textures and describing them to experimenting to create different textures and understanding that different materials can be combined to create different effects?

Thanks

Green Hippo x

[Guest tinkerbell]

Junk modelling is a great medium for this .Often on a Friday morning we have a junk table,parents send in their recycled waste for this,we provide masking tape,,Sellotape.staplers,PGA glue scissors and the children set to work ,they make fantastic models and explain how what and why eg a little boy made a solar panel ! He had attached a clear food tray to a long piece of tape and had pvad plastic milk bottle top s as buttons to turn it on and off,tin foil plays a part ...it is really lovely to see the children using the skills they have learnt eg measuring around a container with ribbon before cutting it to fit,using the right glue eg not print stick to stick fabric and plastic.

it is a real problem solving activity as the children have to work out how to attach different materials to get their desired effect

[Melcatfish]

I often note this when they combine different mediums so for example if they paint a background then collage items onto the painted background. Recently a group of my children wanted to make Jungle pictures so they painted different shades of green onto some paper, stuck green wool and leaves from the garden on top of the painting and the cut out printed photos of wild animals to stick their jungle.

I had initiated the painted backgrounds with the animals stuck on but the children decided they wanted to make it more like a jungle by adding the real leaves and thread as vines.

Mel

x

[Guest]

In our paint mixing area, we encourage the children to add other textures to paint like sand, rice, soil, flour etc and this often gives us observations we can link to this area