Veterans Day Observation

On Friday, I was lucky enough to observe the elementary school during their Veterans Day Celebration. The students had been working on Veterans Day stars all week, decorated with red, white and blue stars and stripes. The halls were decorated with coordinating red, white and blue, and all of the children were also dressed to match. The teachers wore red, and Veterans were roaming the hallways before the big program. It was definitely a great day to be there!

The first grade students were working on drawings with shapes and stripes. They went over the primary colors and the colors in the rainbow. Like their Mondrian project, they were to use red, yellow and blue to create three shapes of their choice on their paper and color them in. From there, they were using the colors and order of colors of the rainbow to create an interesting background and outline to the shapes. They learned about Roy G Biv and how he helps them remember the order of the rainbow.

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet.

The first graders also learned that Indigo is the same as blue, so they didn't need to worry about finding a marker to match. They also realized that Violet meant purple. Many of the students didn't have the fine motor skills to use the markers the right way, or to keep the white of the paper from showing between their lines, but many of them did a great job with it! A few of them rivaled Ms. M's example.

The sixth grade students were at the Veterans Day Program during their class hour, but they are currently working on their space ship models and are covering them with tin foil! They all look pretty cooky and odd, but space-like with the tin foil covering them.

The fifth grade class was VERY exciting because my partner and I introduced our lesson plan to the students! It was our first day of presenting a lesson to a real class of students (instead of our peers in college classrooms). We are working on a Gourd Reduction Project, which involves gourds from the garden of Ms. M's friend. The gourds are about as big as the palm of my hand, and very easy to hold onto. The students will be painting the gourds with acrylic paint and using tools to scratch a design onto the surface of the gourd. Friday was all about introducing what a gourd is, what parts will be positive space and negative space and what the word reduction means.

In order to explain it better to the students, we noted how reduction sounds like "reduce" and the children knew what reduce meant. We said that reduce means to lessen, or to take away. We said to use a reductive process would be taking away the paint from the gourd by scratching it off, not carving into it. They grasped a lot of what we were talking about and were answering a lot of the questions correctly! After our power point presentation, we talked to them about different shapes and symbols that could be used on their gourds. They are required to use three shapes or symbols on their gourds, but they can do more. They then used the rest of the class period to draw symbols or shapes that they enjoyed, and if they wanted, they could draw a gourd shape and design what they wanted to do on their gourd. The next class period will be painting the gourds, and working with a texture over top!

For a part of the lesson plan assignment, Ms. M was video taping us. We shut the lights off for the power point, so she thought it was too dark to get a picture, but after the lights were on it was still dark! The lens cap was still on the camera! Our first day of the lesson plan can be heard, but not seen! It was too funny. Hopefully the next couple of days will be caught on camera as well!