When Halloween rolls around, I like to try activities that channel the children's eagerness for some fun but still touch on something informative and, yes, maybe even academic. I have traditionally taught origami related to Halloween, showing students geometry concepts while folding ghosts and goblins. This year, we made greeting cards with black cats. It's a neat opportunity to emphasize how to follow directions, and to develop spatial awareness and manual dexterity (folding paper may sound easy at first, but it can be quite challenging). For instructions on how to make your own origami cat, visit Pink Stripey Socks. Here are a few samples of our greeting cards (click to see full view): Feeling particularly ambitious this year, I decided to incorporate a little science as well. On Pinterest, I found an activity called "Frankenworms," which was extremely cool! All it requires is some thinly sliced gummy worms, a solution of baking soda and water, and some vinegar in a tall glass to make the gummy worms come alive. The gummy worms needed to be soaked in the baking soda solution for at least 15 minutes before being placed in the glass of vinegar. (To see detailed instructions for making Frankenworms, visit the site Playdough to Plato.) As the students excitedly watched their gummy worms wriggle and writhe, I explained how the baking soda solution was a base and the vinegar was an acid. When the gummy worms had soaked up enough baking soda solution and were placed in the glass of vinegar, it caused a chemical reaction (carbon dioxide bubbles), therefore causing the gummy worms to float. Here is a moment I captured of our dancing gummy worms: Quite honestly, I think these activities can be done year-round! Many thanks to the room parents who brought in the supplies for the science and origami activities, and for coming in to help the students. Your help was invaluable and made for a fun and smooth learning time for Room 17.
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In a room full of educators, Maya thanked them with this message and reminded them that she wouldn’t have achieved so much if not for the rainbows in her life.
And her beautiful spirit still soars. Rest in peace, Maya Angelou. To all mothers out there, all my warmest wishes for a wonderful and blessed day with friends and family! Although I am not a mother myself, I truly appreciate how much heart and soul the mothers at Fairburn pour into the lives of their children 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Today I also pay tribute to my own mother, who has helped me in countless ways ever since I started teaching. She has tutored my struggling readers, taught cursive lessons, and drilled the kids on times tables. She's done just about everything from teaching full-out math lessons to sweeping the floor and sharpening the pencils. As a mother and a former 2nd grade teacher, she has kept me grounded and given me so much practical wisdom. She kindled my interest in teaching in the first place. Thank you, Mom! This past week, my students made greeting cards in honor of their mothers. The project involved writing portrait poems, which are composed of a few similes to describe a person. After drafting their poems and copying them onto plain white index cards, the children drew and decorated the letters M - O - M on three separate pieces of colored construction paper with oil pastel. They glued the letters onto white art paper which had to be folded into thirds to make a trifold greeting card. Because I know it's very difficult for young children to measure and fold paper into thirds, I measure the paper for the students ahead of time -- pinching the paper at every third section, allowing students to fold it more easily themselves. Here is my sample (front and back): Thanks to the fun teacher blog, Simply Skilled In Second, Room 17 was able to dive into the new year with a thoughtful and colorful activity, the 2014 flip flap book. Essentially a booklet made of different-sized overlapping pages, this flip flap book encouraged the class to reflect on highlights and favorite memories of last year and to think about resolutions for the new year. I started off introducing the idea of new year's resolutions with a read-aloud I found on YouTube of the children's book, Squirrel's New Year's Resolution by Pat Miller (I was so thankful to have this video, since I didn't have my own copy of the book on hand). After the read aloud, we made a list of our new year's resolutions on the Smartboard. Among my favorites were, "I resolve to use my iPad less," "I resolve to practice more piano," and "I resolve to read more!" Students then recorded their new year's resolutions in their flip flap books.
One of the highlights of the fall semester was Fairburn's first ever Art Night, which took place on November 20. The evening offered an exciting variety of workshops in photography, sculpture, drawing and painting. I volunteered to teach two workshops on Cezanne. Since each workshop was going to be 45 minutes long, I had to think of a lesson that was simple and direct, accessible to all ages, and allowed children to finish the project in less than an hour. Thankfully, I found a wonderful lesson on Pinterest that fit the bill. I began the workshop by showing a few still life paintings done by Cezanne, including Still Life With Apples (1895), quickly going over his use of composition and color. My introduction was quite brief, about five minutes. I then moved on to the project we would be doing, showing an example I had created the night before: Here were the steps needed to create your own painting in the style of Cezanne: Materials: Drawing paper (gray or white) Pencil 4x4" square of cardstock Oil pastels 1) On a 4x4" piece of cardstock, draw an apple shape that touches the edges of the paper. Cut the shape out to make a stencil. (For the Art Night workshop, I had these shapes premade to save time and to make it easier for the K-1 crowd.) 2) Trace three apple shapes onto a sheet of drawing paper, keeping composition and space in mind (suggest overlapping the shapes, having an apple lying on its side, etc.). I used a midtone gray paper for Art Night because I like the way gray paper brings out the brilliance of pastels, but white paper would work also. 3) Trace the outline of the apple shapes in black oil pastel. Add a horizon line (or as I like to call it, an "excuse me" line). 4) I always encourage my students to be creative when using color. I explain how if we think like artists, an apple should not just be a plain red, yellow, or green, and show how to mix hints of orange, yellow, or even blue or purple with red to make the most gorgeous colors. The photos below demonstrate how I apply layers of color to make an apple really "pop" from the page.
5) Apples saturated in color! 6) Color the background (wall) and the tablecloth with a non-apple color, such as purple, blue, pink, or brown. 7) Fill in the rest of the background and tablecloth with apple colors: yellow, red, orange, or green. 8) Add stems with black pastel. Completed still life. A couple student samples (the first is obviously in-progress): I found that students had success with this project on so many levels, and children as early as kindergarten were able to produce remarkably sophisticated and fine quality work. It worked well on the other extreme, too; fifth graders and even parents loved doing this! My thanks to the parents who volunteered to make this wonderful Art Night happen, and to my awesome colleague, Ms. Lessner, for assisting me. I'll be perfectly honest, I was never a fan of Halloween. However, as I teacher, I capitalize on the idea of Halloween as much as I can and use it as an opportunity to spice up my instruction and pique students' interest. One of my primary vehicles is through literature, and I shared some of my favorite books, both funny and spooky, in a previous post. I also include poetry as well, and during the month of October Room 17 had fun memorizing and reciting the traditional "In A Dark, Dark Wood" and "I'm Not Scared!" by Karen Baiker. Practicing these poems develops fluency in reading and confidence in speaking in front of an audience. Something wonderful happened a couple weekends ago when I happily rediscovered some material from my old lesson plan files. It was a copy of an excerpt from Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches' chant "Double, double, toil and trouble." I used to give this to fourth graders to memorize, and I thought, why not try it with my 2nd graders? I gave a very brief and general summary of the Macbeth story, and concluded by sharing film composer John Williams' rendition of "Double, double, toil and trouble" from the movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." You can listen to this catchy and delightfully wicked song here: We later used this goodie from Shakespeare as inspiration for writing our own recipes for magic potions. Besides this piece of music, I draw on other music that has long been associated with Halloween, including "Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns and "Toccata and Fugue in d" by Johan Sebastian Bach. "Danse Macabre" was a particular favorite this year, and we had a devilishly good time doing some impromptu writing while listening to it. We even got to dance to it, thanks to our wonderful dance instructor, Ms. Devon Wall, who taught us how to freeze into all sorts of marvelous shapes with our bodies based on a broom, a trick-or-treat bag, a witch's hat, and a jack-o-lantern. Of course, there must be visual art in the mix. Students used chalk pastels to make spider web drawings and the following week, pumpkin patch landscapes with oil pastel: We wrapped up our Halloween funfest by making origami ghosts. They were deemed "simple" on the YouTube video where I learned it, but was quite a bit more complicated for my 2nd graders. Even so, they still found it engaging and, despite a bit of frustration, seemed determined to get all the steps down. Thankfully, I had two parent volunteers who were able to help the children with the trickier folds. The bubbling excitement from the students from all these activities is quite contagious. It almost made me like Halloween . . . almost!
After eleven years of having students complete the prosaic grammar and math review worksheets when they walk through the door each morning, I finally grew weary and thought it was time to spice up our morning warm-up routine. On Monday, I give students a math riddle or puzzle, hence the new moniker, Math Riddle Mondays. And Thursday has now become Think Outside the Box Thursday, the day on which students are challenged to stretch their creativity and make a shape that no one else can think of. We started a few weeks ago with this shape: Students could turn the paper any which way they pleased. Here are some fabulous samples: Here are some Think Outside the Box shapes done in subsequent weeks: When students finish drawing their shapes they write about them using a simple sentence frame: "I turned my shape into a _________________." It's a fun and engaging way to start our Thursday, and the students look forward to seeing what shape I give them each week. Their ideas have been pure fabulousness!
I must confess, the majority of the lessons I teach have either been prescribed by my district and come straight out of a teacher guide (e.g., Treasures, EnVision Math), or have been borrowed or, as I like to put it, "legally stolen" from other teachers. I can honestly say that this particular lesson, however, is 100% my own. (Other teachers out there who are reading this, if you fancy this project, are welcome to go ahead and steal this from me!) I think foldables are one of the most engaging instructional strategies in a teacher's arsenal. Connect it with art, and I believe one has a winning combination. Students didn't even complain about the extensive note taking that was involved while creating this foldable. Before we made them, I showed my students a PowerPoint about the elements of art I found online. It's an excellent, child-friendly presentation that uses masterworks by famous artists as examples to introduce these elements. It also covers the principles of art, too, but I save these for another time. I give each student a sheet of manila cardstock on which the elements of art are preprinted on one side and the sections for writing notes have been appear on the other: I guided the students through plenty of paperfolding, as you can tell by the creases on the sheet above. Once these creases were made, we began copying notes that I write on the Smartboard. Although this step can be laborious for the kids, they worked meticulously at writing things down. Below is a video that shows how the finished foldable works. Each panel on the front corresponds to a section of notes underneath. At the beginning of the year I don't do much in the way of structured art lessons and I don't stress technique or skill. As one way of getting to know the children, to learn about their natural abilities as artists, I gave them hardly any guidance with this self portrait project aside from some quick modeling with a self portrait of my own. I did, however, want these self portraits to be bold and big, so I gave each student a piece of large brown construction paper (12" x 18") and a set of oil pastels. Giving them pastels, rather than crayons or colored pencils, is a way of keeping students away from the tendency to draw tiny. They were also each given a tagboard stencil of a head-and-shoulders shape to help with sizing and proportions. The results were pleasantly surprising, and to me resembled the style of Expressionist or Cubist artists. A few had a wonderfully luminous quality that only pastels can bring. This art project was also a means of getting the children to write an introductory paragraph about themselves. In fact, students had to write about themselves first before they were given their art materials, so their motivation to write was very strong! Students were given the following group of sentence frames to help them write:
My name is ______________________ and I am ______________ years old. My favorite things to do are _______________________________________. My goal in second grade is to __________________________. I was particularly fascinated by what students wrote down as their personal goals for 2nd grade. Many students wrote down subjects they enjoyed, such as math or reading (or art!). A few expressed goals such as "to not get distracted," or "to listen good." To see more self portraits, visit the Art Gallery page. One of my favorite beginning-of-the-year activities is the heart map. It's quite a visual, graphic, artsy, and simple way for children to express things that are near and dear to them, and a sneaky but engaging way of fitting in some writing as well. Moreover, I find heart maps to be valuable for me as the teacher, for me to learn about my new students. After completing our heart maps we share them with each other. A wonderful ice breaker activity, and we save them to use for future writing pieces. Here are some beautiful, detailed samples by my very own second graders:
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