lessons for second week of october

Into the second full week of October. Two classes have earned all 4 gold stars and will get a choice day in class. One third and one fourth grade class. A bunch of other classes are on their 3rd gold star. I am going to make a pocket for each station and have each kid put their name on a stick and put their stick in the pocket of the station they want to go to. No more than four kids per station. We will switch after 15 min. To make it fair I will have to put their sticks in a cup and pull them randomly so we don't have fighting over stations. When we switch we will go in reverse order so the kids that choose first will choose last and vice verse.

For the rest of the week it will look like this

Life skills: leaf rubbing (hand over hand), tape leaf down with tape doughnut, tape down paper
Kinder: Finish coloring, cutting and pasting fish from two weeks ago
First: Leaf rubbings with side of crayon and fall color tempera wash
2nd and 3rd: Where the wild things are unit
4th and 5th: Aboriginal symbols and dot art, perseverance drawing practice
6-8th: Get all aboriginal art done! Fall leaf ATC, fall batiks

Notes:
1st. Rubbing needs to be done with a dark color, black, purple or dark blue. Paper needs to be removed. If I could melt down old broken crayons in the silicone tray to make chubby crayons that would help. same watered down tempera wash that the 3rd graders used

2nd and 3rd. Read the book. Two art projects, watercolor monsters and sailboat
I would like to add a collage element to these by using goggle eyes and some fun foam shapes maybe.

In the book Max travels home on a sailboat so we are going to do some texture painting, collage and perspective with this lesson. This project is originally for younger kids but I think it will work well for my kids. Pretty high success rate I hope. I like the idea of making texture in the water and sky and the look at perspective by having larger in the front and smaller boat in the back. I think this is about three weeks worth of projects.

4th and 5th: Trying to teach persistence is the new theme for the school. I want the kids to see that much like practicing a sport or a musical instrument that if you practice drawing a object repeatedly you will get better at it. I am going to have about 12 how to draw sheets to choose from and have the students choose something that they find interesting. Then for the first 3 min of class each time they come for the next two months they will parctice drawing their object. I hope they will see improvement (fingers crossed) We will then look at a short powerpoint of aborginal dot art and look at the symbols chart. Then we will play the tell a story table game that I played with the older kids. Next students will choose 1 to 3 symbols and sketch them on paper and paint them in a solid black. Let dry till next class. We will then dot paint them in using rows of solid color around the black images. Only three colors of paint will be used. Hopefully this will produce better results than with the 6-8th graders.

If the kids seem to like the aboriginal art then we will do this project
although I don't think they have the patience to do this project yet.


6-8th: are all over the place getting their scratch boards done. We have had kids gone for entire week at a time sick. Others rushed through (6th grade) while some 8th graders are taking a really long time getting supper detailed

We have been making some fabric and glue fall batiks that have turned out really well. I have the kids practicing for their India unit batik flags. I also want the kids to make ATC using the accordion book that we used for our first project. I want the kids to make little storage books like in this picture.


So we are going to make this collection book and then today we made the textured paper from this project


each student will be assigned a type of leaf or the acorn and will make 5 cards. One they will keep and then the other four they will trade away so that they have five different leaves for their collection book. On the cover we will paint a tree in Klimt style.

My 6th grade students seemed excited about the card trading idea. My 8th grade students (I only have one 7th grader per class...go figure) are not so thrilled about having to give away their "good" art and take the 6th graders "baby art" (direct quote from one kid). It is rude but she had a point. I have some 8th graders that have taken art with me full time, everyday for almost two years now. Their work is far far superior to the work of the 6th graders that are coming to art for the first time. The music teacher and I both teach two sections of 6-8th grade electives. We keep pushing to have a beginning and an advanced level class each term. We will see if it happen.

PS. the school secretary STILL has not put in my supply order from the start of the year. We are totally out of supplies. I'm begging her to do it but she says she is too busy and will get to it when she gets to it.