Seahorse P/1
Year 2 Room 3
Both classes worked on the theme of CICAK in art as part of the celebration of Beaconsfield starting Bahasa Indonesian as its Language.
At our school we are learning Indonesian as our second language. Indonesia and Australia both have house geckos, or cicaks as they are called in Indonesia.
How you say their name is a lot like the sound they make, especially at night when they are feeding.
Just because they are small, and are mainly active at night, you might not notice if they started to disappear but maybe you would miss hearing them.
We looked at many images of geckoes as they appear in real life, in art forms and especially how they are used in simplified graphic design ideas in logos.
We worked out just what it was that made a gecko look like a gecko - for instance not a frog and we learned a lot about how geckoes are mostly awake at night. They have special sticky pads on their toes to help them cling to a ceiling or a wall and they also have small claws on the end of each of their toe pads.
The Banners - Long ones and a Big one
We all drew our own cicaks, then chose four of them to go onto the four long skinny banners. In groups we tied the cloth with elastic bands around buttons and then used a spray bottle to dye them with dala sun colour. We left them on the lawn to dry and the next day took out the buttons and elastics.
When Mrs O'Brien was telling Brad at the Zoo how great the long banners were, Brad wanted them to go to Surabya, but Mrs O'Brien said they were too small to match Brad's other banners. So then, they decided... we could make another big banner and use all of the four stencils again. It was a lot harder to do the tie dying on one large piece of fabric - and harder to get the dye where we wanted it as well. It didn't look so good after we took out the first set of buttons we had tied up, so... it meant tying it all up again and respraying - but... it was worth it.
Each one of us helped with rolling the ink over one of the stencils. We love our Cicak stencils on our tie-dyed fabric. Our smaller long banners are in the Library now - they look very colourful there.
Our Banner was on the front page of the Fremantle Gazette.
The Flags - bright and colourful
We all drew our own cicaks and then Mrs O'Brien traced our designs exactly onto stencil plastic and cut them out for us. She didn't want us to use scalpels and said that she found it a relaxing thing to do on the front verandah on a weekend.
Then... it was over to us. We had to 'test our media' by checking which permaset colours would look best against the colour of the silky flags; work out which flag each of us wanted our cicak to go on; plan the best way to fit the stencils into the space and what way we wanted the cicaks to be pointing.
Time to work as a team - sets of two people worked together to make sure the stencil stayed exactly in place and to warn the stenciller if it looked like the roller might go over the edge of the plastic. Hardly any mistakes at all !
Our CICAK stencil flags have been used to decorate the school at the Parent's morning tea, the art room for a teacher's PD session and now look fabulous in the Library by the computers.
Our orange flag was in a photo in the Fremantle Gazette and on the front page of the Melville Times
Wild Ways Conservation Art Project
in association with Perth Zoo and Access Asia
Even small animals like Cicaks and geckos, whether they live in Indonesia or Australia,
are important and need to have a safe environment..
Our banner travelled to Surabaya to the Children Conference on Climate Change 2007
Our banner, with other school's banners will be on display at the Perth Zoo during January 2008.