School 33 Reggio Emilia Atelierista Blog: March, 2017

It is always busy at Bilingual Center, which is one of the great things about working here for teachers and going to school here for students. There is never a dull moment.

Pre-K have been continuing the theme of things in the ocean by studying an artist who creates underwater sculptures. For the pre-k art exhibition, teachers tied the student artwork to an artist. In our case, we chose Jason deCaires Taylor because his artwork is hauntingly beautiful, combines the sea theme we've been studying with nature and full body sculpture, so the students were able to see what our bodies look like and get past the primary technique of having arms and legs grow out of heads.

The students started by creating the sculptures of people.

I love that this one seems to be doing a hair flip:

They created a background scene with fish and water.

They added "coral" and other sealife "growing" on their sculptures with loose parts.

Kindergarten:

102 has been creating habitats for their hibernating creatures and writing stories about the animals waking up in the Springtime. They have been thinking about resources and what animals need. We used a variety of loose parts, natural items and recyclable materials for the habitats.

104 and 106 are learning about working together. How our bodies work, with the parts of our body working together, is a theme we are investigating in the atelier. We are making skeletons, then adding "muscles" and "skin" to create dolls that will be used in play to show how children can work together. The kids will play and create stories with the dolls.

Skeleton with wire

Tape muscles.

Plaster skin.

First Grade:

First grade is working on a massive project about transportation and travel. This project is tying in natural resources, passports (brigance information, like their full name and address,) stamp-making, landscape drawing, writing, books, research and so much more including 3D printed models of modes of transportation!

In the atelier, students created stamps showing a resource, geographic feature or economic draw to a place they wish they could go. The stamps will be used to stamp the other kids' passports once the student presents on the location and teaches their classmates about it. They will collect passport stamps as they learn about the places.