The schedule this week was all switched up in order to accommodate PSSA testing and still provide the kids with creative experiences during their stressful testing week. Instead of coming Mon-Wed, I came M/T/Th/Fri in the afternoons.
2nd grade:
the 2nd grade teachers kindly switched their sessions to AM on Monday and Tuesday instead of their usual afternoon schedule. In Ms. Drossner and Mr. Pitt's classes we introduced the money collage project with counting up our class value, and practicing matching values with the colored paper. Ms Spangler's class tallied up the values of their pictures, arranged them in order of value from highest to lowest, and created a hallway display. We need to meet up for the next step in our plans for 2nd grade.
3rd grade:
Ms Didonato's class had a second day of puppet-making, with an added reinforcement of elapsed time measuring. Ms. Lex's class started their puppet-making and will have another chance at it. Unfortunately I missed meeting with Ms O'Donnell's class, but we'll catch up.
4th grade:
Armed with colored duct tape this time, the 4th graders were successfully able to create their geometric paper sculptures! YES! I love how persistent the students have been through this project. Sculpture engages totally different thought processes, and they seemed thoroughly committed to making their sculptural forms.
One boy taped his hexagonal prism pieces together, folded the squares in to make the creases, and brought the folded piece to me in delight saying "Look, it blooms!!!"
The sticky duct tape worked far better, and I did not hear complaints of failures or frustration as I did last week. The only hard part was sharing a roll of tape amongst a table.
5th grade:
Ms Albert's class came down for their "build" day on their drawing machines. This class had mostly machines involving paint of some sort, which proved to be a messy session.
The spiral art machine worked superbly!! But the ink pendulum was a bit sloppy. They discovered that watercolor ink flowed out too quickly- with calls out that it looked like someone bled all over the paper! They tried again with tempera, but weren't happy with the splats. I think they need an in-between viscosity.
Oh the paint mess of certain groups! yikes! But we got it all cleaned up. Many of them just need to think about controlling or constraining their variables to make it more successful. One group didn't get to try their machine out yet, but they were incredibly focused on the engineering of their structure:
Ms. Gelfand's class tried out some variations to fix machines, and wrote up their directions. I think we're almost ready to swap and try out machines. It would be excellent if we had some experiments to put into the science fair night!
