Dot Day
On Thursday 6th October, The Mead celebrated 'Dot Day'. This was a cross-curricular day, themed around the book ‘The Dot’ by Peter Reynolds. In the story, a little girl named Vashti feels frustrated in Art class because she thinks she can't draw. Her teacher encourages her to make a mark on the paper and see where it takes her. This begins her journey into discovering that you can make beautiful Art with just DOTS, and also that you can do anything that you set your mind to doing. The overall theme of the story is ‘growth mindset’, the idea that intelligence and skill are not fixed but rather can be developed through hard work and perseverance over time.
All the children created their own dots. The Nursery children worked together to create their own large whole class dots. The children used their favourite colours and used different objects to print patterns into larger dots. In Reception, the children learned how they can mix primary colours to make new colours. The children explored colour mixing and also created their own dots of different sizes. Year 1 children looked at adjectives to describe different types of dots e.g. furry, spiky etc and then worked on creating their own. They were introduced to the new resource oil pastels. Year 2 children learned about the power of the little word 'yet' and how, if they think they can't do something, they just can't do it.....yet! Children also created symmetrical patterns using dots in maths. In the afternoon, all the children had a large empty dot, which they filled in the style of German artist Hannah Hoch, using cuttings from magazines that caught their eye. All the children really enjoyed this!
There was no worrying that they weren't creative enough....they just thought about the book's motto which is 'just make a mark and see where it takes you'.
