Life Cycles, Time stories, and games

 2nd graders are learning about Life Cycles- especially of butterflies. While the 3rd and 4th grade classes were making our video, I met with 2nd grades in the artroom. We watched some animations of plants, butterflies, and birds moving through a life cycle and brainstormed lots of different species for the categories of plants, insects, and birds. Then we painted our backgrounds in a wet-into-wet technique to create a soft landscape appearance. The kids loved watching the paint bleed into their water-painted paper, and watching the yellow paint drip, "grow" into the blue, and transform into green.

We created our own "inchworm" stamps to stamp out the perimeter border of our picture. (and sang my inchworm song). Finally we drew our life cycle pictures on top in crayon, choosing to do an insect, bird, or plant through its life cycle. The kids were asked to make them detailed and colorful. Each group of students with similar subject matter projects had a chance to stand up to show off and compare their pictures for critique.

 Here and there are some random Kittens and Lizards.

3rd grade has returned to Time Stories. Ms Lex and Ms O'Donnell's classes are painting, while Ms Didonato's class finished constructing their "stage" and added their characters. Each time story was written out to show the start and end times to calculate the passage of time.

 4th and 5th grades started working on planning our playground game mural by analyzing their favorite games and designing their own game. I brought a large painted canvas labyrinth in for the students to walk as well:

After walking the labyrinth we talked about why games are important for humans and what games teach us. The labyrinth was a wonderful metaphor for the life cycle: it has a single path, beginning, middle, and end. If you get confused or lost you need to ask for help from someone more experienced. If someone ahead of you is going slowly you have to learn to be patient and wait your turn. Everyone has their own way of living and growing- not in the video below, one student danced his way through the labyrinth:

 Ms McGinley's class went out to the playground to help us select our site for the mural and measure the area so that the correct amount of paint could be purchased. We found a space with a 5x6 array of concrete squares each measuring 4x4 ft. The children calculated that each square was 16 sq ft making the total 480 sq ft.

Next week 4th grade is traveling to the John Heinz Nature refuge for some hiking and drawing to connect our mural with life cycles as well.