Monday October 15th

I was gone all of last week, with Sumner and Sarah subbing for me. It was a little rough – they did great, but with the year being so new I hadn’t had much time to work with them, so they more or less were on their own. I had the older kids start out the week by writing a statement of purpose – something they crafted to define themselves now and what they wanted for themselves in the future. It seemed to go over pretty well – going to have them continue to fine tune and edit these as part of their larger self portrait project.

Otherwise, we used last week as catch up time – they finished their self portraits, started on their journal covers and got some free time. The Kinders, in an effort to keep up the idea of community, were asked to draw something they wished for themselves, then something they wished for someone else, ie, what would a fireman, the bus driver, an elderly person, a homeless person, wish for? Sumner had a great idea and had the 1st/2nd graders make up fortune cookie fortunes for themselves, which was pretty cool and seemed to work out well.

Today, we moved into talking about abstract art. I had the students all write about their best friend, and their best friends characteristics. I then had them assign that friend a color – if their friend was a color, what color would he/she be, and why? They then did the same thing but with an animal (as a bonus, I got to give a funny example by pointing out that certain students whom were talking and being squirmy would be a little, loud poodle if I was writing about them at that moment – oddly, that example seemed to resonate stronger than any!). After that, we made the segway into what abstract art way, and how it was representational, etc. Then, we started the color mixing project – I had them sit down with paints and just play with mixing colors, only they had to record how they got each color, give it a name, and a few description words. They didn’t much time on it overall, but I think they’ll do a really good job with it later this week.