accueil site > Paysage et patrimoine > 01. Teaching materials > 01. Nursery school > The garden in winter : white
Tell the scene of a story located in winter, like theater or movies for which manufactures the artificial snow, rain
OBJECTIVES
To adjust one’s opinion to that of others’, depending on the result
To experiment on and identify materials permitting to produce the expected effect
SKILLS
To cooperate in a situation of collective production
To make the most of the expressive resources of a material
To make a 3-D composition that responds to a desire for expression
REFRENCES
Nils-Udo
PROCEDURES
Before the sequence
Tell a story that takes place in winter and ask the children to try to illustrate its text with drawings, paintings, collages with white paint. Collect the pictures. Talk about theatre or cinema sets, for which snow and rain are artificially produced.
Widen the children’s culture through the presentation of works of artists who, like Nils-Udo, transform a real landscape by installing ephemeral sculptures in it.
How to prematurely transform a landscape – the school’s garden, for example-, so that it can be the winter set ?
Imagining what the garden will be like in winter.
The children observe and describe the garden as it is today.
Their assumption : the trees and flower bank would be covered with snow, the ground would be frozen.
How to “make" flower banks and trees covered with snow ?
1st project : to cover the flower bank with snow
List materials that imitate snow : white paint, cotton wool…
Get the children to compare their opinions and to test each suggestion.
Paint will not be accepted for environmental reasons.
The children cover the flower bank with sheets of paper. They are not satisfied with the result. The sheets of paper can be blown away. They eventually cover the flower bank with cotton, just letting a few flowers stick out.
2nd project : to make a snow-covered tree
The children’s suggestion :
Put a branch into a pot so that it can look like a tree (as you can’t take the leaves off a tree)
Look in the class for materials that can be stuck to the branches and that look like snow
Stick (with Scotch tape or glue), roll… all these various materials
Take photos of all these productions
FOLLOW-ON- ACTIVITIES
Make
a garden planted with white flowers
notebooks of white gardens (cf. Aline Rutily’s Carpet-Gardens and notebooks)
Work with Jean Dubuffet’s “Winter Garden" : grasp the painter’s plastic vocabulary and use it to cover tree stumps and branches
ASSESSMENT
It will measure
the awareness of the produced effects, of what the photos bring to the story
the use of the catalogue of techniques
L’équipe de l’école maternelle Ampère St Germain en Laye (Yvelines ) France