So many of our kids are really good at sports, but 5th grader Ali Leo’s basketball skills are something very special indeed.
He practices every day during break times, and is also a member of a junior team.
Ali Leo shows off his skills. Click to enlarge!
As you can see, he even proves quite a challenge for our assistant sports tutor, Shane, who is not only a very good player indeed, but has also had a few more years to practice 🙂
We love watching Ali Leo’s techniques and tricks get better every day, and really respect the fact that he puts so much time and effort into training.
We asked him a few questions about his favourite sport.
Why do you like basketball?
Because it makes me feel good and I get stronger and better at jumping. Also, the dribbling skills give me better coordination.
What team are you in Ali Leo?
The Red Hawks. I practice on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we also play games against other teams.
How long have you been playing?
Not so long. I started in January 2021.
Have you got a favourite basketball player?
Yes! Steph Curry.
Is Ali Leo a future sports star in the making? We wouldn’t be surprised.
Even if you didn’t know singer Kate Bush before, you probably do now. Especially if you’re a fan of the Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’… and let’s face it, who isn’t?
Without giving too much away, we’ll just say that Kate’s song ‘Running up that Hill’ has a starring role in the latest instalment of the series. The song was first released in 1985, but due to all the attention it has received from ST fans, it is currently at the top of the charts in many countries. Not bad after 37 years.
Juno and Emma know the lyrics off by heart, and decided to give us not just one, but two renditions. One of them while lying on the floor in the playground. Why not?
You may notice that a couple of other vintage classics made their way into the girls’ repertoire: ‘Neverending Story’, which also features in Stranger Things; and the theme from ‘Ghost Busters’. Cool!
If you’re one of the millions of people who have fallen in love with Kate’s song, it’s well worth listening to more of her amazing music. Just like the Stranger Things series, Kate’s voice and musical style is unique, unusual and even a little bit otherworldly.
On hot summer afternoons we sometimes take the short walk from school to the lake.
Needless to say, the kids love it, and the short excursion makes for a special treat as the end of the school year approaches and the children are able to spend really joyful moments together.
Mr James Brennan swims out with the kids to make sure they’re safe (as you can see in the video, they love to chase him with bits of seaweed). 🙂
Other staff members have to stay onshore to keep a lookout, but the whole scene is so idyllic that no one minds just watching. And anyway, there’s always an ice-cream from the kiosk to look forward to afterwards.
We are SO lucky to have this beautiful beach just minutes away from IMS. Time spent here always feels like a mini holiday, and the memories are golden ones, which I’m sure the kids will treasure for many years to come.
Friends are forever. And not just the pals we make at school, but also the famous American TV series, which many of our students continue to love years after it ended.
Noga is such a huge fan that she decided to make this graphic showing the cast in three different stages: as students themselves; how they looked when they were in the show; and how they are now.
A treat for everyone who loves Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe (which is all of us, right?). And don’t forget to click on the picture to enlarge it!
In the 1950s, America became the leading centre of western art.
Artists such as Joan Mitchell, Wilhelm de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock combined purely abstract painting with the Expressionists’ emphasis on bold colour and line. The result? You guessed it: Abstract Expressionism, or AbEx for short.
In addition, the act of painting itself became important, with every dribble, splash and splotch valued as part of the end result.
At the time, many members of the public found this style ridiculous. ‘A child can do this!’, they said.
In art class, we proved them absolutely right by creating our own fantastic versions of these works.
Yet although it was fun to splatter, splodge and drip, considerations such as composition, white space, and judging exactly where to apply the marks were surprisingly important. To help the kids achieve this, I gave them a demonstration, and limited the colours to primaries and black.
In fact, the greatest works of Abstract Expressionism are far more complex than many people think, and the children’s versions were incredibly accomplished.
Pop Art
At the moment, the kids are learning about everyday materials and recycling with their class teachers. I try to reflect these themes in art classes, too, and luckily, there’s a very close relationship between household items and Pop Art.
After all, this 1960s movement transformed things we constantly use into art objects, from soup cans and comics, to photos in a magazine.
What’s more, Pop Art itself is actually a form of recycling, with the artists involved showing that even ideas and images can be re-used in different ways.
For this unit, the children created a wide variety of colourful artworks.
The younger kids were inspired by Andy Warhol’s famous soup cans to create a new range of soups with very unusual flavours, such as ‘chips’ or ‘popcorn’.
The cans were then photoshopped onto bold, bright backgrounds to create eye-popping Pop.
Another group produced a homage to the artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings were inspired by comic books.
Like the artist himself, the kids carefully added dots to a template to replicate the printing effect (below).
Meanwhile, the older kids worked on a group project that turned Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa into a funky, psychedelic fantasy (famous paintings were often reworked by the Pop artists to make pictures that seemed familiar yet new).
This collaborative artwork required the use of colour values – light tints and dark shades – before piecing together painted and collaged sheets to create one (very) large image. Perhaps the best part was guessing how it would look when finished. 🙂
Op Art
Optical Art, or ‘Op’ for short, appeared in the early 1960s at around the same time as Pop Art.
Most Op Art uses optical illusions to create an uncanny sense of depth or movement, but for this project I decided to do something a little different – a kind of Pop/Op hybrid.
Warhol and other artists were fascinated by Before / After advertisements. We’ve all seen these: a classic advertising format in which two images side by side demonstrate the (always amazing) benefits of a product or service.
Left: Andy Warhol, ‘Before and After 2’, Pop Art 1963 / http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/popart1963/items/show/111 Right: Roy Lichtenstein, ‘Step-on Can with Leg‘, 1961
Using black, blue and red ink viewed through blue and red filters, we managed to create a rather magical Before / After experience: two pictures in one, seen separately by applying the science of colour and light.
Above: the images viewed through the filtering lenses.
American artist Robert Indiana first turned the word ‘LOVE’ into a Pop Art image in 1964, but in 1970 he produced his even more famous sculpture, which remains iconic to this day.
Using this work as inspiration, the kids created cardboard sculptures of either their names, or terms such as ‘cool’ or ‘wow’. Interestingly, no one opted to produce their own version of ‘love’, although the word seems a pretty good one to me!
The only rule was that the letters should all connect together, and the results were incredibly varied – as colourful and unique as the children themselves.
What’s next?
This more or less brings us to the end of our art (history) classes for the year.
In the new term, I plan to continue looking at late modern and contemporary art – there are so many fantastic painters and makers the children can learn from, and I particularly want to focus on female artists who, for historical reasons, were badly underrepresented in the Modern period.
I also want to spend time revising techniques such as blending, shading, colour values and perspective.
Although I’m looking forward to these classes, I’m sad that the current 6th formers will no longer be with us.
They’ve worked very hard indeed, and contributed so much to the success of the Art programme. But it’s good to know that they can take home a portfolio filled with beautiful and ambitious artwork as one reminder of their time at IMS.
One of our students, Adelina, is an incredibly talented ballerina. So good, in fact, that she has just won a coveted place at Berlin’s best ballet school.
Adelina – who has been learning ballet since she was three years old – recently donned her ballet shoes during breaktime to show us some of her amazing moves.
Juno, who is also learning ballet, wanted to join in, but unfortunately managed to look rather undignified when I first filmed her sprawling on the floor.
Of course she insisted on showing what she can do, too, so Juno is performing in the second part of the movie, and Adelina in the first.
We will miss Adelina very much indeed, but wish her every success in her new school. We also look forward to seeing her in leading roles on stage in the very near future – and perhaps Juno will be there with her, too!
But from an art historical perspective, Cubism is such an important movement that I definitely wanted to present it to the kids.
The key to understanding Cubist art is the fact that it integrates multiple viewpoints into a single image. Painters such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque or Olga Rozanova wanted to challenge ‘reality’ by showing how things look from the front, behind, or the side, all at the same time.
In order to replicate this process, the older kids combined line drawings of objects photographed from three different angles, then completed their work using colour palettes borrowed from the Cubist artists themselves. It’s not an easy task, but the results were outstanding.
The younger children made Cubist portraits, and although they found it a little strange to draw things like two noses, or eyes in unusual positions, they understood the concept and produced some beautiful, colourful work.
Apart from looking fantastic, Cubism reminds us to question what’s around us: there’s never just one way of looking at the world.
And this, in fact, is exactly what the class teachers were asking the kids to do with regard to the theme of ‘fast fashion’. Many of us buy clothes from stores such as H&M or Primark, but what is the true price of these cheap, mass-produced goods?
The often-surprising answers formed the basis of a presentation and project which the kids completed during Freiarbeit. Cubism’s insistence that the truth has multiple viewpoints is relevant to almost everything.
Modern sculpture: Giacometti
Even though the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was influenced by both the Surrealists and the Cubists, his work really is in a class of its own. He is rightly considered one of the most important modern artists, so we set about making our own versions of his work.
Steven Zucker, Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By scrunching up aluminium foil (much of it recycled), we were able to recreate the long-limbed figures he is famous for. Some of the kids opted to make animals (Giacometti did this, too) and one or two of the children decided to give their figures outfits (unlike Giacometti!).
We later spray-painted the figures to emulate the bronze metal of the original sculptures. They turned out really well – good enough to be shown in any art gallery!
Expressionism
Germany’s own contribution to modern art is immense, and for me, the powerful lines and forms of Expressionist prints (about 1905-1925) are especially wonderful.
Examples I made to demonstrate the line drawing process to the kids.
For this project, it was easy to reflect the theme of everyday materials by using both foam sheets and recycled polystyrene to create our own interpretations of these works.
The younger kids had the slightly easier task of creating line prints (above), while the older kids produced more complicated works that looked like woodcuts by artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
This girl got a guinness world record certificate because of her long name. Her mother wanted her to have a unique name. That’s why it’s so long. She doesn’t only have a very long name, but also a very long second name.
This video was posted in YouTube on the 05.01.2019. !!! ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼
In art class we’ve been making our own versions of Pop Art, so in English class it seemed like a good idea to find out more about Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the most important Pop artist of all.
After learning more about his fascinating life, we decided to recreate one of Andy’s famous parties, with each student developing a character for the event.
Warhol loved to film the people around him, so we did this, too, editing the footage in a chaotic, home movie style similar to the artist’s own work.
The film is followed by a little bit of background on how the kids came up with their roles; the interesting discussions and research that were involved; and why Warhol’s ground-breaking influence is more relevant today than ever.
The background
Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Today, we live in an age of YouTube and TikTok, and his words seem incredibly ahead of their time.
I also explained to the kids that Warhol was an early ‘influencer’, one of the first people to use art, media and social events to publicise his own life.
He loved to host parties where he was surrounded by other rich, famous, or artistic people.
Many of the guests were very creative, larger than life and sometimes a little eccentric. Others were show-offs, who liked to be with Andy because it made them feel important or interesting.
I asked the kids – all of them year 5 or 6 students – to create suitable characters for the party, and was surprised by how well and quickly they were able to do this.
They invented exotic names and ‘glamorous’ lives for themselves, but were also clear that these weren’t the kind of people they would really like to be, or meet.
Some of the kids wanted to wear costumes, so we looked at early ’60s fashion. The kids found it strange that young guys often wore suits or jackets!
We also talked about what happens at a fun party.
All of the kids thought that music was important, and dancing was a top priority for the girls. We watched videos of ’60s dance styles, which the children liked, but often found quite funny.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, alcohol was also something the kids were keen to discuss.
The children automatically connected drinking with celebrating, which gave us an opportunity to talk about this in depth.
We spoke about alcohol’s effects on the body; why too much of it can be bad for your health, and how it is banned in some cultures.
We also talked about the pressure older kids sometimes feel to seem ‘cool’ or grown-up by drinking.
Yet because it is very much a part of our society, I decided to let the actors use a champagne bottle as a prop – they insisted that the party guests would be sipping bubbly!
Watching the movie afterwards, we again discussed some of the issues it raised.
Celebrity, fame, and self-image sometimes seem more important today than ever, but it’s essential to stay true to ourselves and develop our own values.
All the kids agreed that it was fun to play the characters in a Warhol movie, but far better to get back to being themselves!
For our 6th graders, the last few weeks of term will also be their last days at IMS. The year seems to have passed so quickly, and it’s hard to believe that some of the kids will soon be saying goodbye.
Aurelia asked two members of the newspaper team what they are looking forward to at their new schools.
Unfortunately, the sound isn’t great, but hopefully you’ll be able to follow everything the girls say. Oh – and stay tuned for the final section of out-takes and bloopers!
And a word or two of thanks …
As general editor of IMS News, I’d like to give my personal thanks to Noga and Juno for their enormous contribution to the success of the blog.
Noga joined us early on, then had a break to focus on her studies and has since returned, full of ideas and enthusiasm.
Juno was a founding member of the newspaper, and has worked tirelessly week after week to provide interesting and entertaining stories, videos and features.
I sincerely hope that their memories of the time spent on the IMS News team are as happy as mine.
