speed building.

Hello there. It has been a while...

Let me ease back into this thing by sharing a couple images of my recess construction crew. I have an open door policy at recess, so that students may finish projects or free draw if they choose. 

I also have a bunch of wooden blocks in my room and a small team of 4th grade girls has been stopping by to see what they can build in 15 minutes. It's great! They understand that whatever they build, they are going to have to take apart before they leave. Sometimes the structures have been very tall, sometimes short and wide. I have really enjoyed having the girls visit. It's pretty cool to see what they come up with and what kind of dialogue they have with each other as they are working. 

They work extremely well together:)

Keep it up ladies!

styro snow.

Bit of a different week around here. Parent conferences are going on, so we are not meeting with classes like we normally do. I have 3 fifth grade classes this week for a shorter than usual time. I decided to do a low impact, read low mess, sculpture project.

I have used starch packing pnuts for projects before. Usually they are colored and go by the brand name Stik-its. For this project we used plain ol' packing pnuts.

At the beginning of the lesson we talked about symmetry in art and how it could occur in different directions in a shape or form. I drew a simple snowflake (vertical, horizontal, 2 diagonals) to model this on the whiteboard. I then told the classes that was what we would make today.

Huh? A snowflake? Cool. Um, okay... Were some of the student responses to this. I showed them how the pieces would stick together with a little water.

We all started out making the basic snowflake shape. After that I stressed that it was up to them to make their snowflake unique like snowflakes are. The could build up, out, across... I reminded them to focus on creating symmetry in whatever they made.

The students did a great job with the project. There was certainly a lot of variety in shape and form.

The fifth grade groups are the most social of my grades, and they did a fantastic job keeping things "chill" in the room as they built their pieces. I plan on selecting a number of them to display in the school office for the month of December.

Beauty, Clark:)