Thursday, October 17, 2013

116, bilingual second grade.  The group who painted the clouds came to the studio to work on their mural again. Upon taking a second look at it, and at the cloud pictures we'd taken that day, the students felt frustrated and didn't feel that it was their best effort. They asked if they could redo it. I felt torn- the art teacher in me didn't want to waste the paper, but Ron Berger's voice was ringing in my ears, talking about quality of work and making more than one draft.  I agreed, if we promised to put the first mural to good use on another day.  They agreed and eagerly took to work.  They loved the results of the second draft.  

This is part of a project on Community.  We aim to display the community of School #33 around the second grade classrooms.  The students in 118 have been working on observational drawings of the school and the surrounding buildings. 116's mural will feature living and non-living things that the students research and create.

The rejected mural.  "There's too much gray." 

"It's beautiful." 

Here is some dialogue we had about community while they were working:

Community

T- What were some of the living things in our community?

S1- Animals- cats

S2- We should do a Buffalo!

T- Do Buffalo live in Buffalo?

S2-Yes, on the mountains?

T- Is that in the city?

S2-Yeah, off the Thruway.

T-Is that our community here?

S2-Yeah... Wait, no. No.

S3-I think we need a bee hive!

S4-And a spider!

S3-We could do that for Halloween!

T- Do spiders only live at Halloween?

S3-No. They live every single day.

T-What are some non-living things in Buffalo?

S5-Piñatas.

S4-Trees!

S1- Trees are living. And they give us paper.

S2-Paper is made of trees, but paper is non-living.

T, looks out of the window.  S1 catches on and, soon, others look out of the window, too.

I see cars.

Dead leaves.

Houses.

Windows.

A fence.

Chairs.

Grass.

Grass is living.

My shoe is non-living.

T- Are flowers?

Flowers are living.

Garbage.

T- Do we see garbage outside?

Yes.

T- Who takes care of that?

The people who pick up trash.

And the recycling truck.

They are community helpers.

T- Who else keeps our community nice?

The police.

T- What is their job?

To check if someone is robbing you.

"It's perfect now." 

118, monolingual second grade.  Speaking of the Community project, I took a group from 118 outside to draw the school.  Since they are learning to measure using single objects in math class, I showed them how they can "measure" a subject using their pen.  The corner of the school closest to us was two and a half pen lengths tall, but the far end of the school was only one pen length tall.  By holding up their pens to measure the sizes and angles, they were able to see and attempt to capture difficult perspective. I'm really impressed with this first piece.  Take a look at it, compared to the photograph of the school.

"I know I can only draw what I see, but the airplane is flying over, so I can draw that, right?"

The photograph cuts off the top, but this student does have a good angle on the right side of the building.

101, preschool- I had the students explore color mixing for the first time using fingerpaints, like I'd done in 103. The exclamations of "look! I made green!" were exactly what I expected and we'll move onto the tempera paint exploration next.

104, bilingual kindergarten. The students are really interested in nature, so they wanted to make a classroom tree.  We made the trunk out of a huge sheet of brown paper with black and multiple shades of brown lines painted on it with roller brushes, to mimic the look of bark.  

                                    

When the students came in today, I asked them about the branches. They said, "They are sticks."  I asked how we should make them, but they didn't have any ideas.  We looked at photographs of trees and saw that the branches start thick and get smaller as they branch off the original trunk.  One student said, "I think we should roll the paper to make the branches!" which is exactly what I was thinking, but I didn't want to run the show.  I asked him to demonstrate and gave him a huge piece of brown paper.  He rolled it and then asked for paint to make the bark.  He showed his friends and soon everyone was rolling and painting branches.