Skip to main content

ARTiculate Bulletin #5 - Have you tried The Shape Game by Anthony Browne?

Get your new year off to a flyer with Anthony Browne's excellent The Shape Game. The perfect starting point for short, simple activities to get your class talking, discussing, drawing and working together.

'Have You Tried?' ideas sheet for The Shape Game can be found here

The Shape Game by Anthony Browne

The Shape Game is all you really need in order to understand the magic of Anthony Browne. On a family trip to the Tate Britain art gallery in London,  Anthony Browne gives us insight into his love of art and his childhood discovery of visual jokes and lends us a launch pad from which to analyse paintings, decode symbols and interpret art.


In brief: Have you tried? 

Ideas for talking and thinking: Interpret and discuss meaning in art and look for symbols in paintings.

Ideas for writing: Collaborative written interpretations of famous artworks. 

Ideas for art: Play the shape game like Anthony Browne turning doodled shapes into pictures!   

Enjoy!

Stefan

Popular posts from this blog

Progression in primary drama - going beyond the National Curriculum

Drama is an integral component of primary English teaching. It is the engine that drives creative responses to stories, helping children explore characters, settings and predicaments. Yet the primary National Curriculum for England (DfE, 2013) makes scant reference to drama. Some generic guidance indicates the importance of speaking, listening and performing although these points are both too obvious and too generalised to be useful to teachers and subject coordinators hoping to embed drama across the whole school. When writing our forthcoming book, Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage (Routledge, David Fulton, 2021), both Maureen and I felt that whole-school drama guidance for primary teachers - so integral to teaching Shakespeare's plays - was notably lacking from online resources currently available (apologies if you have produced such a document but we could not find it!). We decided to compile our own. In fact, you may have found this blog post...

Filthy wretch or poor thing? Rethinking the Island, KS2, Week 1

A treat for the final half term - a new workshop at a delightful school in Leeds! This half term I am working with two Year 5 teachers to develop a cross-year group, cross-curricular writing project based on my favourite picture book, Armin Greder's The Island . I've done this book many times and every time the response is different! This week, we got to grips with the facts, possibilities and mysteries of the story. What do we know about the story so far? (we only ever read up to page 6 to leave it on a knife edge...) What doesn't this story tell us and what could we infer or predict?     We looked at the crowd of islanders who 'welcome' the stranger's arrival. As in every class, country or community, no group ever sees the world the same way and we discussed how the islanders might react differently to the man. Is he a poor thing who needs to be rescued? Is he a curiosity? Is he a threat? We each adopted an islander and took on their perspective f...

Computer games and 'deep play'

“Computer games are not a waste of time. They help me think strategically.” That is the best excuse I could come up with when my wife asked me whether I had spent the day wisely playing the strategy game Rome: Total War all afternoon, rather than tackling the pile of assignments I had to mark. In a way, this is true. I don’t run a business or manage other employees. I work alone, usually teaching online, managing my own workload and switching between a variety of self-generated creative projects. So, growing a city, managing an army, designing a profitable dinosaur amusement park: these activities demand a different kind of mental engagement than my usual work. And, yes, gaming is also fun and, as a career in professional football management is unlikely at this stage in my life, it offers a simulated experience for things I am probably not cut out for (although, at 39, I still feel I have a season or two in me as a non-league reserve goalkeeper). Classic city bulding game, The S...