4th/5th grade final project

 Our final project for the 4th and 5th grades was to create a game mural on the school recess yard. At first we did a labyrinth walk to spark the conversation of why games are important. The labyrinth was a metaphor for life and growing (which tied in with science content around life cycles)

 To prepare for the mural we decided on a location and measured and calculated the area in order to determine the amount of paint needed for the design.

 We spent a day playing and analyzing different boardgames to help brainstorm a design. Students were asked to come up with a game design of their own and include some form of labyrinth and a four square court. After reviewing and compiling the students' designs, I brought 4 possible versions for the students to vote on. The one above received the most votes. 

 Somehow between rainy days in May and super hot days in June, we managed to get the mural painted. I brought 6-8 students out for about 15 minutes at a time so all the 4th and 5th graders had a chance to do something on the mural. We measured and marked out the blocks of color to be painted around the perimeter.

 The classes all worked on creating flower and leaf stencils inspired by the drawings made by the 2nd and 4th graders' trips to the John Heinz Nature Refuge. The flowers were stenciled in black around the perimeter, and the leaves were stenciled in green to mark out the labyrinth.

 At one side, a hopping game was created in the form of a lily pond, complete with frogs at either end and the life cycle of a frog marked out across it.

 The foursquare court in the center contained symbols for the four seasons. The water and vine labyrinth has a red snake hiding in it. The imagery throughout represents habitats, life cycles, seasons, and change.

 The mural creates a bright spot in the middle of a vast concrete courtyard, and creates new possibilities for play during recess. The games laid out in the mural are open-ended and allow students to create their own rules for playing on it, encouraging fairness and creativity.

 On the last day we tried (between rainstorms) to go out and try playing on the mural. Four square was a big hit!

Back in class, we spent some time writing about favorite projects through the year. Painting the mural was a highlight of the year for many students. Many students requested that next year we do some work in clay.

For the fourth grade, my favorite project was at the beginning of the year as we went from meandering water to eroding landforms to coordinate treasure maps. Fourth grade was wonderful this year- students were well-behaved and eager to participate. They fared well with both individual and collaborative projects, and they did some wonderful reflective writing throughout the year. They do better with concrete/realistic type artwork rather than abstraction. I feel like we could do similar things next year.

For the fifth grade my favorite project was our drawing machine process. I loved seeing the kids work through the design process and collaborate. However, most of our projects in 5th grade were too drawn out, and the classes were so large, they were a little hard to manage efficiently. We also had scheduling troubles do to Mondays and end-of-the year events. I think we should start earlier in September to move through our 30 sessions effectively. I'd like to do more short projects with 5th grade. Their attention is so easily distracted by the social side of being 10-11 years old, that they might work more effectively with something more fast-paced and energetic.

November 15,21,22

I'm behind on posts after being sick all last week. I called out on Monday, but went in on Tuesday the 15th to make sure Tuesday classes didn't get too far behind (they already were because of Election day). I've been better at remembering to pull out the camera in some classes more than others...

2nd grade: 2 weeks ago we began our color wheel and color family equations. This past Monday we reviewed the color families, practiced drawing geometric and organic shapes using lines that started on an interior edge of a square, moved into the center space, and returned to the same edge. We figured out simple shapes versus complex shapes. Finally we selected our color families and stared the background of our notan pictures. Next week we'll draw out our final notan pictures and begin cutting and gluing everything.

 3rd grade: Last Tuesday, Ms. DiDonato's class printed their pattern coin pictures. They were very creative with their patterns, moreso than the previous class (did I do something different in explaining patterns to them? Or is it just a fluke of who is in each class?)

 This week we tallied them up to find out the value of our pictures. The most "expensive" one was over $8.00 worth of coin stamps- lots of quarters I guess. At the end of class we had our "art auction". I was able to explain the process a bit better and the kids made more savvy bids.

Ms. O'Donnell's class began the color wheel/color families lesson like the 2nd graders. We were able to get pretty far and started the backgrounds for the notan project. Now her class is on the same page as the 2nd graders, and a week ahead of the other 3rd grade.

4th grade: Last week we learned about scale and gridded over our contour rock drawings in order to enlarge them. The drawings were 6x6 inches and we transposed them to 12x12 inch squares of corrugated cardboard for a 1:2 ratio of scale. The largest shapes were cut out of brown, then traced onto green to make a smaller concentric shape, then the green shapes were traced onto orange for the smallest concentric shapes. We saved all our scraps of corrugated cardboard for use this week.

 Those scraps were used to cut into strips to coil into columns to start turning our concentric flat shapes into small relief sculptures.

 Ms. Yancey and Ms. McGinley helped man the glue guns once the kids had their coils ready. Once children had each of their individual pieces built up, they worked in teams of 2-3 to combine their individual sculptures on a new group sub-layer. I told the kids we were pretending to be wind and water carving away each layer of our paper/earth. Ms McGinley's class is just a little further ahead. I think it may take another 2-3 weeks to fully complete.

5th grade: During my day off sick I spent more time experimenting with the sunprinting process than recuperating. It turns out that the sun and temperature are too weak this time of year to let the sunprinting process work, so I decided we would shift to stenciling instead of sunprinting. Ms Gelfand's class completed their stencils on the 15th, but discovered that drenching their fabric meant lost detail. I was able to warn Ms. Albert's class about it before they started and they ended up with much crisper stencil images.

 We pinned paper stencils to cardboard, then used fabric paint to stencil. Each table shared one color (grumble, grumble!)

 Ms. Gelfand's class got to complete the project this Tuesday by adding details and text with sharpie marker. They look very bold now!

After adding the details we had some time for written reflections:

Next week Ms Albert's class will wrap up theirs and Ms. Gelfand's class will move on to our geometric forms project.

Monday the 7th

Monday I met with Ms. O'Donnell's 3rd grade. We stamped out an exact amount on 2 more index cards, noting that there might be different coin combinations to get there. Then we arrange our coin value card deck in order from largest to smallest amount. I like how through the lesson Ms. O'Donnell gave numerous synonyms for the words we were using. Finally we had our art auction! We explained that in an auction one bids an amount one is willing to pay, and the bids should start small. if someone wants it more than you they can bid a higher amount, but the goal is to get it for the cheapest amount.

 I had made about 30 printouts of various Andy Warhol images and mounted them on blue card as our items to bid on. We had viewed Warhol's work at the beginning of the residency, and the kids love his bright pop art. The final picture, for the last kid to bid (no competition since everyone who had gotten a picture couldn't bid again) went for $0.03 whereas most of the other pictures were auctioned of for over a dollar!

 The 5th grade class reviewed stencils and posters, and I demonstrated how we would create our combination paper/mylar stencil for image and text. The kids had a chance to sketch out their words and images together to get their spelling and content approved. They glued their paper stencils onto the mylar and then used sharpie markers to write out the text. To inspire more aesthetic text I brought in handouts with a selection of font styles, which some students were excited to use.

 I think their stencils turned out wonderfully, and have interesting compositions of word and image.Let's just pray for a sunny day on Monday!!!!

Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures during the 2nd grade class. However, we started our new project to reinforce number families. We made a color wheel with colored construction paper in our sketchbooks, an noticed that the primary colors make secondary colors for 3 major color families. Then we made color family stories just like the kids usually make number families. For example:

R+Y=O

Y+R=O

O-Y=R

O-R=Y

The kids drew boxes in their books for each color family set and colored in the appropriate boxes. I modeled the first 2 sets on the board, and most kids were able to figure out the 3rd set. Next week we'll start our color family notan project. 

Tuesday, November 1st with 4th, 5th,and 3rd

What an exciting day! Ms. McGinley and Ms. Yancey's class had a very hands-on science/art project involving rocks and water and drawing and printmaking- Whew! We're starting to talk more about erosion, and first looked at a picture of the Grand Canyon to brainstorm what could have made it so deep. Interesting answers: (everybody thought my alien laser beam idea was silly) we heard earthquakes, tornadoes, rivers, rain, glaciers, and volcanoes. It was interesting to see the range of natural forces they understand to create change on the earth. Then we looked at how to make a contour map to understand how high or low the ground is. While some students finished stitching their river meanders, the rest took turns coming back to 6 stations. First we arranged rocks in plastic takeout containers, then drew outlines of the rocks on the plastic lid, poured in colored water, traced the new contour, poured in more water, traced, etc. Then we laid a damp paper over the drawing, rubbed the back and revealed the transferred contour map. Then students drew over their lines to make them more bold and colored in the spaces. We've glued them into our books ready to use as a pattern for our mountain sculptures.

I also managed to retake photos of their meander embroideries:

In Ms. Gelfand's 5th grade we did the same stencil/poster lesson as on Monday's class with Ms Albert, which went equally as well. When I arrived the students were sharing their sun/energy/time reflections they had prepared to incorporate into their project. With the smartboard available I was also able to share with them the Allen McCollum unique shapes image to help stress the "SIMPLE" image idea. Here are some results:

 I love all their spiky suns.

In Ms. Didonato's 3rd grade we decided to switch activities based on the process we experienced in Ms O'Donnell's class previously. Instead of starting with the complicated pattern coin stamping image and huge coin tally, we've started with the "war" card deck stamping and easy small change tally. We managed to get everybody through the printing process, but lacked time for tallying values. Ms. Didonato's class is really hurting from the difference in time- we're a whole lesson behind the other class now. I wonder if perhaps we should switch with Ms. O'Donnell's class next week and give her class a morning session on Monday- especially since they'll miss Tuesday for election day. Here's what they did:

Monday with Ms. O'Donnell and Ms. Albert

Happy Halloween everybody! I came in for the morning only this Monday and met with the 3rd and 5th grade classes. In 3rd grade we completed our tally up of what our pictures "cost". These were a lot of coins to tally up, but they did a great job, considering. I brought them home to mark and find out how everybody did.

Here's the breakdown:

• 3 absent students
• 1 student transferred the correct number of tallies for Q, D, N, P, but did not add them up
• 12 students correctly added up their pictures/tallies
• 7 students incorrectly added up their coins, however of the 7 four of them were only off by one coin (a matter of either transposing their count wrong or miscounting over or under one coin), so only 3 students were really off.

After the tally we created 10 coin cards with random stampings to create a "War" deck of cards. They tallied up the coin counts on each card to write small on the back side. Hopefully they'll have some time to play with their decks!

In 5th grade we talked about stencils and templates, and how they have to be very simple shapes. We also talked about posters and why someone would make a poster. The kids offered ideas such as for advertising or for presenting information and that they have words and pictures. I said our sunprints will be like posters that show what they know about the sun after all they've been learning in their science classes. We based our stencil designs on their drawings from last week, but they needed to SIMPLIFY a lot. They all sketched out a new version in their books for approval and then we passed out paper for making the stencil. I went around with a small whiteboard to sketch out examples of how they could alter their images to be more stencil-like. Once drawn and approved again, the kids cut out all their stencil shapes. Those with time were asked to write something that explained "What I know about sun energy" and connected to their image in some way. it would be great if they could plan out the writing portion for next week so that we can transfer the text to our transparencies for our sun prints.