Art: A Lesson in Pointellism

Last week's fall-themed art lesson was inspired by one of my favorite paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jette by Georges Seurat, as well as THIS ART PROJECT I found on Pinterest. The children created fall trees using pointellism, a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. (Definition from Wikipidia.)

Image from The Art Institute of Chicago's website

The kids had so much fun creating leaves with tempera paint and cotton swabs. There were many groans of disappointment when it was time to put our art supplies away. Parent, if you're interested in seeing all of the class' most current artwork, please stop by! Our art is hanging up int he hallway of our building.

For those wondering about the hat that one of our artists is wearing, she earned enough U Bucks to purchase a "Cat in a Hat" coupon. More about our behavior/classroom economy system in another blog post!

Daily 5 Choices

We have successfully trained in all but one of our Daily 5 choices! Daily 5 provides the structure for our Reading Workshop. The kids have really worked hard on building their stamina in each of the rotation choices over the weeks. I love that even in their "free time" they are taking it upon themselves to work on one of the choices.

For more information on The Daily 5 structure, check out out the 2Sisters' (creators of The Daily 5) website HERE. I must point out their tag line, "Work smarter, not harder." I am totally on board with that work ethic!

For "Read to Self" the most popular choice of seating are the classroom laundry baskets. Since I don't have enough laundry baskets for each student and plenty of other choices for seating, students go through a seating rotation. One of my 2nd graders got tired of waiting for her turn in the laundry baskets, so last week she offered to bring in her own laundry basket from home. Too funny!




We finally got our Writing Center up and running for our "Work on Writing" choice. Three students are allowed at the Writing Center. However, since all our paper supplies are located here, anyone can write and in any spot in the classroom. It helps that each student has a clipboard in their Book Bins. We use those clipboards in the Math Corner during Calendar Time as well.


Here's a close-up of a few reference books. The most popular one is the baby naming book. This is to help the students select names for fictional characters in their stories. The runner-up in popularity is the rhyming dictionary. I'm sure that when we have our unit on poetry, this one will be used even more. Another reference book that's sitting in my Amazon cart waiting to be purchased is a dictionary of idioms. We had a discussion on idioms closer to the start of the school year, not a full-blown unit, mind you, and for awhile they kept saying, "That's an idiom!" many, many times during the school day (and at home according to several parents).

Writing center kit "I can write a . . ." can be purchased HERE, and is created by Teri whose blog "A Cupcake for the Teacher"is an incredible resource for lower elementary teachers.

Not only did we get our Writing Center up and running, the "Word Work" stations are also in business! These stations are full of activities that help us practice our spelling pattern words and sight words. I ran out of drawers, and ended up purchasing another rolling cart to fill up with more goodies for stations. So many ideas, so little time - and room!

And what are "Word Work" stations without a Word Wall? Our weekly Spelling words are in the small box on the left. Students are tracked into two groups. Five of the spelling words contain the spelling/phonics pattern that we are studying for the week. The other five words are high-frequency (sight) words. These words are from the Fry Word List. As a reference for their own personal writing, the big box on the right lists sight words, also from the Fry Word List.

Word Wall kit, created by super teacher Erica Bohrer, can be purchased HERE.

I usually decorate with borders from the teacher store, but I happened upon this fancy polka dotted duct tape and fell in love. I used it to create our Word Wall.



And finally, my last Daily 5 choice to share is "Read to Someone." We are still in the process of building our stamina for this rotation. Isn't this the cutest photo of two our our 2nd graders doing "Read to Someone" and sporting our very fashionable reading glasses?! Yes, the lenses have been punched out, and they are available in fun jewel colors at your local Dollar Tree.

So that's it. Four of our five rotations. Our last choice to learn is "Listen to Reading", and once we've got a handle on that rotation I will share photos and news.

"Lollipop Trees"

The class has been studying non-fiction texts with a fall theme. During Friday's art class, I had the kids work with pastel chalks on construction paper. The goal was to create fall trees with a fun, modern twist. The kids decided to call our creations "lollipop trees." No matter what, I think they all did lovely work!

Happy October!

Here's a look at some of the things we've been doing over the past few weeks.

One of our writing lessons taught the students how to label. Some of the kids have really enjoyed labeling, so much that they now label everything. Anchor chart and lesson inspired by this blog post at the Inspired Apple.

We had a health unit for Science that focused on healthy eating and getting active, I think I mentioned it in my last post. One of our culminating activities was filling up a food plate with healthy food choices. Some of the kids even labeled their foods which goes to show that they were paying attention to our labeling lessons. Hooray for that! (Activity from this unit at TpT, created by the teacher over at T.G.I.F. blog.)

Here is one of our literacy anchor charts. The students are really getting the hang of what questions they should ask to help them them become better readers. Lifted this anchor chart HERE from one of my favorite teacher blogs, The Inspired Apple. 

Over the past two weeks we have been learning about nonfiction texts. Inspired by this wonderful anchor chart over at 2nd Grade Shenanigans.

The nonfiction texts we have been studying about over the last two weeks have been science books with fall themes. Topics included leaves changing colors, animals preparing for hibernation, fall temperatures, pumpkins, and apples. Last week we took a virtual field trip to Libby's pumpkin farm, the company that makes canned pie filling.
    

On Friday we studied apples. I brought two types of apples for the kids to taste - Gala and Honeycrisp. We compared and contrasted their colors, sizes, shapes, textures, and tastes. At the end of the lesson we voted on which apple we thought tasted better. Honeycrisp won by a large majority!

Here's a photo of our PK-4th grade choir singing at the church during Education Sabbath. They did a fabulous job!