Friday, October 11, 2013

120, bilingual first grade. I finished the drawing stage of self-portraits with this class.  Now, I'll start taking them one small group at a time to the studio to introduce them to my room and learn their basic painting skills as they paint their portraits.

116, bilingual second grade.  The second graders study "Community Helpers" as part of their theme for social studies.  To hit upon that, as well as bringing in science, ELA and art components, Mrs. Driscoll and I are going to have the students turn their classroom into the community, featuring living and non-living parts of our community (which the students will research, draw, paint and share out about) and a mural background that covers the walls of the room. Today, I took a small group outside to look at the clouds.  The sky background will be the first step of the mural.  We talked about the colors of the clouds, the shapes, and the way the clouds look as a backdrop for the buildings.  The students were thrilled to see an airplane flying over us, leaving a trail of white "clouds" behind it. We watched the airplane's clouds look like they were dripping down after a few minutes.  "It looks like a caterpillar now," one student exclaimed.

The students reviewed some photos I took of the clouds from our walk and then we rolled out a huge piece of blue paper- it ran the entire length of the studio, so it was probably 25 feet or so long. They noticed that the clouds near the "bottom" (the buildings) were gray, but the clouds higher up in the sky were white, so they divided themselves into two groups.  One group stood on one side of the mural, painting the clouds white, and the others work opposite them with gray paint.

The airplane and the clouds it created showed up on the mural.

At the end of the class period, I asked the students to stand up and look at their work.  I asked them to tell a partner what they liked about the mural and to suggest one thing that they think could make it better.  Everyone agreed that the people painting gray at the end of the painting were using too much gray and that area needed more white clouds.  I thought the same thing, but I didn't have to say a word.  They are starting to critique themselves in a productive way, instead of making fun of each other or saying, "I can't do it- I quit!" This class period was a win.

112 self-contained class.  I showed the students Google Earth on the iPad.  We zoomed in from Earth to our school.  This was really fun for them.  It reinforced their social studies lesson.  We zoomed out as we identified our school, our city, our state, our country and our continent.  They wanted to explore the other continents, so we looked at African and zoomed in to see the differences. (The roads are mostly dirt roads, they have deserts and jungles.)  Then, we traveled to China, which looks more like the United States from above. We looked at the oceans and Antarctica's snow.  Now I feel that the students will be more comfortable painting their paper mache globes during the next class and I think this put the social studies concepts in a clear perspective for them.

103 preschool.  We continued our exploration of paint by using only two colors- red and yellow.  I gave each student paint rollers and leaves.  I asked them to predict what color would be created when the two primary colors were mixed.  As they rolled the colors together, they exclaimed, "Orange!  It made orange!" Every student had a clear understanding by the end of the class that red and yellow make orange.  They painted with the leaves, with the sticks that the leaves had been hanging from, and with the rollers.  Some students wanted to glue their leaves to the paper.  Some printed with their leaves.  Some painted around the leaves, leaving the outline of the leaf.  The results are really great for Autumn. 

104 kindergarten.  We went outside and explored the bark of trees.  We saw two trees that had been cut down and discussed the differences between the dead tree stumps and the living trees. The students made rubbings of the tree stumps.  We are going to be creating a classroom tree in the corner of their room, so this exploration gave them an understanding of the texture of the trees.  We'll paint the tree bark on the trunk of their classroom tree next class.

And we saw a grasshopper, which was very exciting.