Khasma

Today I had the kinders do a crafty project since they had been doing a lot of drawing lately. We did Khasma, or Good Luck Hands, as a continuing theme of art from other cultures. The hands themselves are fairly universal – used in Arabic/North African culture, Jewish culture as well as in other forms around the world.



They love doing anything with their hand anyway – tracing, etc. – so they were excited to get to draw their hand, cut it out, then decorate it. I am also amazed at their word retention – we started out class today with a longer ‘discussion’ time than normal, and I am really impressed by the terms (community, abstract, culture) they have been able to remember and understand.



6th graders today got to catch up, and we talked more about our writing club. We are having a party/reading next Friday – to my amusement they wanted coffee, to make it like a coffee house reading. Their writing is coming along nicely, I’m looking forward to maybe editing and helping them type it up a bit. Wendy lost a few pages of her work when her mom spilled Kool Aid on her notebook, but I convinced her to make a poem about the ‘Kool-Aid tragedy of 2007.’ We decided to keep working on our novels through next week, going beyond the November time frame we set, with some time next week going to editing and selecting what they want to read. We also decided that December/January are going to be poetry months, with an emphasis on Haiku’s. They were very excited when I suggested that our reading at the end of January be a ‘sushi’ party…now that I brought it up, they’ll hold me to it, so I’ll have to figure out something cool!