Monday, October 7, 2013

120, bilingual first grade. Mrs. Wagner has been providing inquiry experiences with objects from nature. Students were provided nice, big maple leaves, a large sheet of yellow paper for the table and brown paint. No direction was given, other than naming the parts of a paintbrush, how to hold a brush if you want more control and how to tell if your brush is too dry.

S1-Look at mine! I made a leaf!

S2- It's so cool

S3- He colored his leaf. Can he do that? He can?! I'm going to do that!

S1 paints her leaf and then decides to use it to print on the paper. A chorus of oohs and aahs is given in response. Soon, predictably, others make prints with their leaves.

One group decides to glue their leaves to the paper and paint the entire page brown.

Over the course of the week, they will get one new color a day and layer the paint.

118 monolingual second grade- I took a small group to work on painting technique and texture. One part of this job that I love is when students discover something and they start laughing with joy at the discovery. Today, one of these students found that the acrylic tube he wanted to use was unopened. I watched him and another student figured out that it can be opened by flipping the cap upside-down and pressing it into the tube. He let out a full belly laugh when this worked and the paint started spilling out because he was laughing so hard, he squeezed it.

S1-This color is so ugly. Do you like this color? (A dark greenish brown.)

T- I do, because it's a great color for painting rocks or other items from outside. It makes me think of fall.

S1 thinks about that-The water is the color of dirt now. I think it would be awesome if we mixed the water with the paint, because we could really make a good dirt color.

 108, monolingual first grade- I continued working with small groups on drawings from nature.  I have one more group to go and then we'll take the drawings down from the wall and begin to play with materials- one leaf will be in colored pencil, one in watercolor, one in tempera.  I want them to see how different materials create a different look, to get them to compare and contrast the materials, so that they can make informed choices when selecting materials for their projects all year.

116, bilingual second grade-
The students finished their self-portraits and began to experiment with watercolor for their background paintings.

103, preschool.  This was a really fun class!  I let them finger paint today!  We talked about how the finger paint feels, then the feeling we get when we rub the paint on the paper.  This paint is really great- it has a gel consistency, so even I couldn't resist putting my hand in the jar and playing with it. The kids were ecstatic.

They were only given one color each to start and then switched, so when the red was added to the blue (or vice versa) there were exclamations of "look!  It makes PURPLE!"  Each pair had two colors- the primary colors and white.  The pair with red and white was very excited when their paintings turned pink.

Rainbow

Boat

Dinosaur

Cave

Hole

Gato

The Sea