fairfield primary school

pirates and treasure island (we’re building a box maze)

Fairfield Primary School Fair is on Saturday 14 March from 2-7pm (do come along!).  And this year Elise, Wendy and I are building a box maze.  It’s going to be an indoor one and the kids are going to crawl through the boxes.

We saved the election booth boxes that were at school for the recent State Government election.  And we have been diligently dropping in to Harvey Norman Preston twice a week to collect all their fridge boxes, which they are kindly saving for us. The aim is 100 boxes.  

maybe the ship could look something like this one I found on Pinterest

So, the plan at the moment is that the box maze will start on a pirate ship.  The kids will have to walk the plank to the island (this will take them up the ramp to the classroom door).  Then they’ll enter the castle and follow the maze, climbing to the lookout (they’ll be able to look out a window … a crafty trick to entice other children to wonder what they are doing and visit the box maze), before visiting a fairy glen (fun for the little kids) and entering a pirate dungeon (where the treasure is stored of course).  Before popping out at the end via a waterfall (well it will be a slide really …).

some of the pirate treasure … my inherited silverware is going to see the light of day!

Sounds ace huh?  After some intense Pinterest research that you can see here the major technical decisions for construction are:

1. Fridge sized boxes are the go.  We are using large boxes to minimise the joining required.

2. The boxes will be joined primarily with cable ties.  These make the joins sturdy and mean it is simple to dismantle the maze at the end (we’ll just cut the ties).

3.  We will drill the holes for the cable ties. We’ve had a practice and this is a simple process.

I’m getting so excited. Today we started working on the dungeon.  Inspired by this photo below I am now in the process of photographing the teachers to be part of the ‘pirate picture gallery’.  I am asking to take a photo of them dressed up.  Fun!  Then I am going to make some sort of photo display …. a bit like this hopefully.  With the treasure in front!

how cool is this room? i found this image on Pinterest.

I think my kids would like to be part of it too (the display that is) … the practice run pictures are pretty cute huh?

Art4All 2014

I am SOO exhausted. I was at school for more than 12 hours every day since Thursday.  And I don’t think I sat down for more than 5 minutes at a time for all those hours. My feet feel like I’ve just done an 8 hour shift at Maccas (that was a long time ago).  And now it’s all over for another year. Everything went very smoothly. Hooray. The weather was great. The food was delicious. The art was super.  Everyone did so much!

Here’s some things I made (jewellery, dish cloths, salad servers) and some bits and pieces (including those boxes and my mannequin) put to good use in the shop.

The ARTzone was full of kids being creative all day Sunday.  I think this is my favourite part of Art4All.  Here’s some recycled art … build your own rocket ship in the construction room.

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And some detail from Van Gogh’s Dot Room from Sunday afternoon.  It went from white to very colourful.  And I think there are still 1000+  dots for the kids to stick up at school this week … I like Yoyo’s signature … I wrote LEA in there too, but it didn’t look as cool as her name!

For me the show, Cirque Disarray was a real highlight. The actors fromBorn in a Taxi were just lovely to deal with and I laughed from the beginning to the end of the show.  I had sore cheeks from laughing so much! Especially as Clive, India and Hamish all got starring roles.

 

cows and elephants

This week I am officially obsessed. The school art show is on this weekend and I am waking up at 5am thinking about what I need to do next and jumping out of bed to add to my lists.

On the weekend so many people came to the working bee and did great stuff at school. Like reinstalling Milkshake. Milkshake is the fibreglass cow that lives in the schoolyard. But her horns were broken off a while ago, and she has been out of commission. Recently she was repaired and then her horns were re-painted by the grade 6 kids last week, and she has triumphantly returned on a patch of fake grass.

This grass is the recycled element of the post. It has been sitting around at school for 5 years. And now it is being used. Hooray. It looks so good.

And then if having Milkshake back wasn’t thrill enough, a 420kg 3 metre high elephant arrived on Sunday night! On a car trailer.

Clive took this snippet of video of it travelling through the Burnley Tunnel.  Geoffrey Ricardo has kindly loaned the school ‘The End, The Beginning’ for Art4All. It looks so fabulous in the school grounds.

The kids have been in heaven. They’ve spent lunchtime lying out on the grass and playing with the cow and/or enthusiastically ringing the bell inside the elephant.

Art4 All is going to be great this year!