I wrote the words on the whiteboard ("What do those mean??!") then held up the pen upright and said, "The pen is vertical," followed by holding it up on its side and saying, "The pen is horizontal," and repeating a couple of times with the pen and then with my finger and finally my arm. "What do you think vertical and horizontal mean?" MashaAllah the girls came up with vertical as standing up straight and horizontal as lying down. 👌
To make sure, I asked them to find examples of things or lines around the room which were either vertical or horizontal - e.g. the edges of the mirror, the window, the corners of the room - then to make themselves horizontal and vertical, which they found hilarious. 😂
On the whiteboard I drew a simple picture of the sky above some grass and told them it showed the horizon - the line where the sky meets the earth (could be the ground or the sea! Another quick scribble to demonstrate!). I wrote the word horizon next to my drawings and asked if they noticed anything about the word... Yes, it's inside the word horizontal! Underlined it within the word horizontal on the whiteboard to make it clearer... And is the horizon horizontal? Yes! (So a quick Literacy lesson on using other knowledge to help guess meanings of new words/word origin 😁)
So their task for today was to draw their own picture of a horizon, to help them remember the word horizontal, and also to include something with vertical lines in their picture too. What kinds of things could they draw? What could they possibly find outside with vertical lines? E.g. tree trunks, buildings, flower stems...
When they'd finished their drawing in pencil on a piece of white card, I took out the watercolour paints; this is where the art lesson comes in.
It was their first time using watercolours so it took a bit of explaining on how to wet the brush, wash it in between, how to mix colours on the palette, change the consistency and strength of the paint depending how much water/paint they used, to keep an eye on how dirty the water was so it could be changed... Quite a lot going on! But easy to pick up just by getting on with it, painting and experimenting!
The toddler joined in too, painting her own picture of whatever. 😄
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