Leonardo da Vinci

We have been following this website to discover the amazing life and abilities of Leonardo da Vinci. Most people know his name because of his beautiful and famous paintings, especially that of the Mona Lisa, but we focused on many of his other skills, although we did do a fun lesson on perspective and colour use in art. We also followed lesson examples on understanding how objects move, visually taking simple everyday tools apart to see how nuts, bolts, cogs, wheels etc., when used together help to make that object work correctly. Looking at the early inventions, using the website and an inventions book from the library was one of the most interesting sections of our learning. To think he came up with the idea of a submarine, helicopter and loads of other machinery well before they actually were built for real and became part of the life we know.



For perspective, Katie and Ben taped an acrylic sheet to the window and drew what they saw using black non-smudge pens. These looked good in themselves, but after they traced their pictures in order to copy them onto paper and used colour to make them more life-like.