We began our project by looking at the INTO poster for Different Families Same Love. We have looked at this poster in the past but it was very interesting to revisit it with our fourth class eyes. We discussed all the different types of families we could see and we enjoyed doing a drama activity based on dilemmas that families sometimes face.  For our next lesson we had great fun reading through a variety of picture books featuring different types of families. We did this individually and in pairs, then we recorded and discussed our thoughts in circle time.

We decided that we would like to create a piece of art to represent the different families in our lives and our community.  We had been having great fun using fabric and fibre for our Gaeilge theme of eadai, so we tried to think of a way we could incorporate fabric and fibre into our creation.  We came up with the idea of a patchwork quilt featuring individual families, all connected in one beautiful collaborative piece of art.

Before we began, we discussed all of the different types of families we could think of that we are part of, we had met, seen or read about. We came up with 40 different types of families and we could have kept going! (please see document attached to our entry). From this list we each chose a different family to draw. We drew our families onto a piece of fabric, which we then sewed onto a larger patch we had chosen for ourselves. Many of us had never sewn before, so this was a really fun challenge for us! We laid all of our patches out in an order that we all agreed upon and our teacher helped us to sew them all together. Finally we each stuck a letter of the title onto the top of the quilt. Luckily ‘Different Families Same Love’ has 25 letters, the exact number of children in our class!

Have a look at pics below.

Fiona’s 4th Class