The children looked at a variety of graffiti and street art and I posed the question, ‘Is street art like Banksy does a new form of art? After a discussion the children were shown a various cave paintings and we established that early humans may have used art as a way of helping themselves in their struggle for survival. Paintings of animals on cave walls were common. Perhaps this was thought to bring success when hunting or may have acted as a call for help from a spirit world the people believed in.

We then learnt about the sculpture Alberto Giacometti and experimented creating sculptures of cave men and women. First we used pipe cleaners and then moved on to creating people out of tin foil and painting them with a bronze paint. The was a challenging skill to master, but the children showed great resilience and perseverance and it paid of as the results were amazing!

The children then experimented with creating papers stained with tea and coffee to make them look like cave and used different media such as charcoal, paint, and coloured pencils to create their own cave paintings and ‘stories’. The children also used sand paper to replica the texture of the caves. We used our Art Exploration books as we experimented and were able to see which media we preferred and why. What do you think?