Monday, September 9, 2013

116- Second grade students from Room 116 were invited into the Atelier today to work on their self-portraits.  I asked them to create a portrait without assistance first, to serve as a baseline, then gave a lesson on proportions of the face.  We talked about how proportion is a concept in both art and math classes, and I promised they'd learn more when it comes time to talk about fractions. The students were given time to redraw their portraits using the information I presented and some students made tremendous gains in terms of proportion and realism. I plan on having them create a third portrait with their photos, to practice drawing from observation.

108- When I went to the first grade room today, the students were scheduled to spend time in the different stations around the classroom.  The block station was filled with excited chatter, so I decided to observe and document what those students were doing.

Ariana enthusiastically told me that her castle was the biggest castle she's ever made.  We talked about how exciting that was and I asked her how she could remember her castle. We decided that I would photograph it and she would draw it, so she could always remember how to recreate such a large castle and maybe figure out a way to make a bigger one next time. 

Another group was working on a fortress.  They created a whole story around their block structure, which included role playing and whole body play. I asked them to tell me about their wall. K and J are the students, T is the teacher.

K- We made a wall to keep the evil out.

T- What do you mean?

K- There's a little evil over there and evil people are over there, too, and we're keeping the evil out of the good side. We don't want the evil people to come over because they make the good people bad. That's why we made that tower. Some of them got over here already, so we have to build the tower really well. We are able to jump over it, but the evil people can't.

T- Why aren't the evil people able to jump over it?

J- The evil people are little, so they can't get over the tower.  But we can. We can jump!  See! <Pretends to jump over the tower.> The blue [part of the rug] is the water that we jump over, too.

T- Can you draw the evil people for me?  I'm having a hard time imagining what they look like. 

The girls drew the evil people for me and then had fun knocking their tower down.