Tuesday, May 15, 2007

May 15th

Kassidy won an award today. Kassidy is one of those kids that makes his mark by continually being on just the edge – nothing really bad, but he likes to create problems for the attention he feels it gets him. He’s been mad ever since he joined us – he was moved from the ‘team’ he was on to the Red ‘team’, he views it as a step down, the team he is now on is for 3rd/4th graders, he’s a 4th grader, but it’s perceived by him to be a step down. He slowly has been improving though, I talked to him about how he needs to make the most of his situation, how it would be a waste for him to spend the rest of the year doing what he was. I gave him a little certificate for leadership and improvement and a ‘fancy’ pencil, he ran and immediately showed it to his big sister when he got picked up today – I was worried he would think it was ‘dorky’ or not care, but he seemed pretty proud of it.

Today we worked on our photo collages – some of the images are below. We looked again the Journals of Dan Eldon for inspiration, a book I have been using off and on all year. Both the 3rd and 5th graders seem to like this activity. I printed up some of the photos they took with the digital cameras over the past few weeks, and brought in both color prints and black and white copies. We then are taking them and making collages – drawing, cutting, painting, stamping, and pasting. We had to have a talk about how to use images of our friends and each other – it’s never okay to do anything violent and disrespectful, and if you want to do something fun or funny, you need to ask permission of the person in the photo first! Everyone seemed to do okay with this though, and the students seemed to respond to manipulating the images that they took in interesting ways.

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