Blog No. 3

I recently discovered a fantastic painting program for primary school children during my PGCE BSE 1 placement whilst planning an ICT lesson on 7.11.16 for my Year 2 Class. The software called 2Paint A Picture enables children to experiment with a variety of brush styles and patterns allowing them to make both simple and intricate digital images using numerous painting tools and special effects. Our literacy topic/theme for the week was “fireworks” and this inspired me to create an ICT lesson centered around images of fireworks as this enabled the children to make cross curricular links.

The lesson was split in two. I asked the children to spend half of the lesson copying and pasting pictures of fireworks in to a Ms Word document as I wanted to assess what the children remembered from their last ICT lesson (during which their class teacher demonstrated how to copy and paste from the Internet in to a Ms Word document). The remainder of the lesson involved using the 2Paint A Picture software to create images of fireworks . Children explored a variety of shapes, colours, sizes and patterns using their brush strokes to depict different kinds of fireworks and background scenes displaying night and day. The “splash” digital filter was particularly popular as children independently discovered the likeness of this filter to “fireworks exploding in the sky”. The “spinner” digital filter also proved popular and children were excited abut creating quite intricate and complex circular images that they described as looking like “Catherine Wheels”.

During the plenary, I asked the children to peer review their art using the IWB. Children were confident and expressed their views clearly giving each child 2 Stars and a Wish.

In short, I would highly recommend this software as the possibilities are endless! It can be used to with both younger children and older children and teaches them to manipulate and explore colours, shapes, textures, sizes and creative painting styles. The children in my class certainly enjoyed playing with different filters and creating beautiful firework themed artwork.