Wonderful Wandjinis!

It has all gone rather Antipodean in Year 2, as they started their new topic on Australia by looking at some early Aboriginal rock art.

Firstly we looked at, then created some stencil rock painting backgrounds for our new topic display board. This involved sponge-painting large sheets of paper in 'warm/earthy' colours then drawing round hand, boomerang and axe stencils with soft brown chalk pastels before smudging them.

Then we focused on some ancient aboriginal beliefs. We looked at Wandjinis, who the Aborigines believed were gods who lived in the clouds and controlled the weather. They drew images of them on rocks and caves using natural materials.

The Wandjini pictures represented different types of weather.

We had a quick practice at drawing Wandjinis and anything else we could think of that we thought was typically Australian.

We also looked at the land where these Wandjini pictures were discovered and noticed that it was very rocky, warm and the colours were orangey and rusty red, so we used this colour chalk pastel for our Wandjini outlines as well as some chalk and charcoal. After we had drawn our outlines we smudged them outwards.

Take a look at our pictures, have we shown that the Wandjinis lived in the sky? Can you see different types of weather represented in our pictures?