School 33 Reggio Emilia Atelierista Blog: Week of May 11-15, 2015

Monday, May 11:

Second Grade:

118 has been using a new method of documenting for Story Workshop that I want to share. We are using Google Docs. Ms. Chowaniec created a working document that lists the students' names and tracks their activities during story workshop. We add dialogue as we get it, progress, things students need to work on, successes. This has been really easy to use and I feel like we finally have a way to connect with each other when we are in separate rooms (the atelier and the classroom, outside and the classroom, etc.)

Today (Monday) I brought a small group to the atelier to work on making their story characters out of clay. At first one student, A, couldn't tell me his story. He said "I don't know about it. Ask D." D reminded him that it's about Plants vs. Zombies, a video game that both boys play.

Who are the characters?
A- The army.
D- The plants, Spiderman and Halo.
A- Oh! I played that game!
I see you have a lot of characters that are from different games and stories. Tell me about that.
A- They are going to work together! They can teleport anywhere they want. Some people teleport and they can't get back because some evil people broke the teleporter. Spiderman teleports to zombies vs. plants, but they end up being zombies vs. Spiderman.

I reread his words to the boys and they like it. I ask if they have anything else to add, but they said they don't at this time. However, a few minutes later, I still heard them discussing the story.

D- The plants team up and help Spiderman. Then, after all that, they help fix the teleporter and they go back to their home.

A- No! They go to the Halo world and they have to help each other and fix each other. Then they go back to the real world!

Final characters for the boys' story.

D started out with the clay working flat, like most kids do when they start using clay. He flattened the shapes on top of the paper to make the correct size. It looked fantastic, but I said, "I wonder how it would look if you made it three-dimensional, like a toy." He said he preferred it flat, so I didn't get a picture right away. I'm so disappointed about this now, because by the time I looked back, he'd decided to make it into a 3D sculpture!

D's second attempt.

D- It's like making the story 3D when you use clay. You can make a stadium or a city out of it. If you have a lot of clay, you could do it.

Pre- K 103:

The students are moving from animal habitats into our own habitats and communities. I printed out photos of their homes and asked them to find their house as they entered. We critiqued the photographs, looking closely at the shapes, lines, colors and items from nature that we could see in the images.

We counted the windows, we looked at the location of the doors (right or left) and we looked at all of the details in the houses.

After that, the students look at the shapes of their house and, using their observation drawing skills, the students drew their houses as accurately as they could.

Pre-K drawing of a house- note the accurate placement of the
door and carefully counted windows. And I love the stairs!

Pre-K 101:

I took a second group outside to look for letters out of twigs and sticks.

"Ch" from the Spanish alphabet!

Tuesday, May 12th:

106:

This pre-k class has been exploring the idea of cycles. Their latest investigation focused on the life cycle of butterflies, complete with a caterpillar habitat. They watched the process, as the caterpillars have turned into butterflies over the last few weeks. Today, I brought plastacine clay into the room. It was their first time using it, so there was an excitement in the air. I have noticed that when a new material is introduced, some children need a period to just play with the material, so I was surprised by how many students immediately began demonstrating the life cycle of the butterfly with the clay. The dialogue was rich as they were creating their sculptures.

Luis- I'm making a caterpillar.
What cycle is that?
Jeysiel- the butterfly life cycle.
Luis- first it's an egg, then a caterpillar, then a chrysalis, then it's a butterfly!
Jeysiel- I like chrysalis.

Natalia's Caterpillar

What are you making?
Natalia- I'm making a caterpillar.
What do caterpillars do?
Natalia- they eat and eat and eat and then they turn into a chrysalis.
And then?
Natalia- They turn into a butterfly!
What are you adding right now?
Natalia- his legs. He has some big legs.
That's a lot of legs. How many are there? Let's count them!
Natalia- 1,2,3,4,5,6!
You just added one more- how many do you have now?
Natalia counts- seven!
She repeats this process and counts eight.
I'm going to come back to you in a few minutes to see how many legs he has then!

I walked around the room and when I returned, she had added two more legs. She counted them to tell me that there were ten legs!

This is Shainelly's story. First, she made a caterpillar:

My caterpillar is eating leaves.

Shainelly- my caterpillar is eating leaves and he's breaking it and then he got tired and he turned into a chrysalis. Now I'm squishing it to turn it into the chrysalis. And now I'm making a butterfly!

She twisted and smashed the clay until the caterpillar resembled a chrysalis. She added clay to the top, telling me it was the branch from which the chrysalis was hanging.

Now I'm squishing it to turn it into the chrysalis!

At this point, Shainelly turned her chrysalis into a butterfly.

At this point, I wondered what details she would add if she took a close look at the real butterflies.

Go look at the real butterflies and see if you're missing anything.
Shainelly- I know what I'm missing.
What are those called?
Shainelly- I don't know!
Maybe one of our friends knows.
Devin- Antennas!!!

Kindergarten 104:

The students have been studying insects. In the studio, we gave them many different kinds of wire, plus some washers and other metal objects, and challenged them to represent their insect using this medium.

Pedro's Stag Beetle

Zianaris' Grasshopper

The students love using the wire, even though it seems challenging at first to adjust to the new medium. Once they get past their initial struggles (It's so hard to bend! I have a hard time cutting it! I can't get the eye to stay where I want it!) the wire gives them a chance to create in a way that is unlike any other medium they've tried before.

These are starting to look like the models of insects they were referring to!

Pedro- my insect has eight legs.
Emily- no, it can't. All insects have six legs.
Pedro- mine has eight!
Emily- those are antennas.
Jadielis and Hunter test Emily's theory and count their insect model's legs. They both get six as the number and confirm Emily's theory.

There is a lot of counting in this lesson, as they keep checking the number of legs they need on each side, the antennas, and even the mouths on some insects!

Second Grade 116:

I had one group finish their book together and another student just needs to add her cover. I can't wait for the students to present the book to the class (hopefully tomorrow.) I think this is going to spark a book writing frenzy! Since this is the bilingual class, this book is written in English and Spanish. It's about types of plants:

Wednesday:

In Second Grade 116, the girls who completed the book were able to read the book to their classmates. They shared the steps they took to make the book. The other students were very interested and I suspect we have motivated them to want to create their own books.

Pre-K 106 continued their study of life cycles with clay. I love how easily the stories flow when students work with clay. Here is one student telling a story about a caterpillar:

Kindergarten 102 created wire insects and a spider using a page from a story they had just read as inspiration.

On Thursday, pre-k 101 and I took a walk to the Valley Nature Park Habitat Trail. We saw a variety of living things interacting with the environment. We found a little snail on the way to the trail. We watched a kingfisher bird diving for fish in the water. This delighted and fascinated the students. Then we saw two adult geese with eleven baby geese swimming in the pond. The pond has lily pads, which Iya informed us are for frogs. We also wondered if there were crocodiles in the pond. Lastly, we saw a butterfly that had blue on its wings, different from the butterflies we've seen previously this year.