Kids are Crazy for Cardboard....

On Friday, I went to the elementary school for the fourth time. It has been pretty difficult working on Fridays because of teacher in-service days, substitute teachers, and early release days. Last Friday I enjoyed working with the first and fifth graders, while the sixth graders were full of misbehavior yet again! Maybe it is having three authority figures in the classroom, or because it is Friday, but these children sure do love to push our buttons!

The sixth graders working on their cardboard projects

The sixth graders were working on their space ships like they were with the sub. This time, they were creating their space ship models out of cardboard instead of paper. These are their projects that will later be covered with some type of material (we were brainstorming ideas for paper mache, foil or just painting them as they are). Most of the students had started their cardboard models in the previous class periods, so they knew how Ms. M wanted them to work with the scissors and cardboard. Instead of using an Exacto knife or box cutters, the children were using one of the blades of a scissors to swipe into the cardboard, bend and break it off. The students were asked to bring in extra cardboard if they wished to work larger (many kids brought in large boxes and worked very big!).  Needless to say, using scissors in a new way made many of the boys in the class think about all of the new ways scissors could be stabbed, thrown and tossed around. One table in particular was not working at all on their models, but instead making gun silhouettes and cutting the cardboard by stabbing into it instead. For the first time we needed to use our classroom management skills in order to keep everyone on task, help those who needed advice on how to cut or measure something, to keep the boys from stabbing their own legs through the cardboard, throwing scissors to friends, and to keep another group of boys from burning each other with the hot glue gun! This time, it was a matter of keeping the children from getting hurt rather than teaching them. I thought the misbehaved with Ms. W around! It was definitely worse today.

Ms. M's project sample and a sample of Piet Mondrian's work.

The Mondrian-inspired work on the drying rack!

The first graders were working with the color wheel and learning about primary colors. They were learning about Mondrian and his work with blue, red, yellow, white and black. The students spent the previous class period learning about Mondrian and how he used series of squares in his work. The first graders already had yellow squares painted on their pictures, but needed to include blue, red and black. Because first graders love to experiement with paint mixing, Ms. M designated different tables to different colors. The black paint and paintbrushes stayed at the tables, and the children moved from table to table instead. I thought it was a great idea, and helped keep the students interested and moving around. It was important to show them how to use the paint brush at an angle to drag the color down the line instead of working with it straight up and down like a pencil. They had gone over this in the introductory day of the lesson, so they were used to the technique, though not all students had the motor skills to really perfect it.






The fifth graders were working on painting another layer on the masks they made a couple of weeks earlier (We were there to help them paper mache their masks). It was fun to see the different designs the students had drawn and what they were putting on their masks. Many students stuck with their original design while other students were merely painting with globs of different colors just to see what it would look like. A few of them really turned out nice! They will be adding different embellishments to the masks as well.

Overall, this day went by extremely fast. Because we were so occupied with the first graders moving all around the room, the sixth graders attacking themselves and each other with scissors, and painting with the fifth graders, it felt like we were only there for about and hour! We also utilized our prep hour with Ms. M to work on ideas for our lesson plan (which we will be teaching in our next meeting) and on how she assesses work. I will be posting a separate post on that soon! Have a great day, and Happy Halloween!