A Busy Art Day

Today we had the privilege of working with two special guests to our school.  The first guest we met was Daina, an actor/mime who is working with us as our spring artist for The Integrated Arts (TIA).  

Daina introduced us to several different games where we practiced doing a variety of things with our voices and bodies.  We began by playing a name game.  Daina showed us an invisible ball that we would be passing around.  The only thing you could say was your name, and this only happened when you caught the ball.  Our next activity was using our voices.  We had to say "Today is Tuesday" (even though it's really Monday), trying to express an emotion.  We first were annoyed and then excited.  Next we warmed up our bodies.  We pretended we were a variety of different things, bugs, birds, rain puddles, and clouds, and moved around and acted as if we were these things.  This was a lot of fun.

Daina is primarily working with us in the artistic medium of mime so we had the opportunity to play and practice several different miming activities.  We pretended that we had to push against a heavy wall, we looked through a window, opened and closed that window, and then we were artists, building sculptures of things we saw through our window when we looked into a forest.  The very last activity of the day was creating our own forest.  Each student chose a plant or animal and became their object.

Here are some pictures of us during her visit.  If you click on them, they enlarge.

Unfortunately, some of us found it very challenging to follow the directions that Daina was providing and were not treating her or our classmates respectfully.  As a class we recognized that this is not how we want a guest in our school to be treated.  We want them to feel that we are respectful and kind and want to work with us again.  Since Daina is returning to work with us on Wednesday and Friday, we decided to write her an apology letter from our class.  We all signed it and will be giving it to her when we see her Wednesday morning.

This afternoon we had another opportunity to work with a special guest artist.  Michael ManyEagles, worked with us, teaching us how to carve soapstone.  We all had a chance to make a feather/leaf necklace and then we received another piece of soapstone to make whatever we wanted.  It was dusty, but fun!  Some of us had had a chance to work with him in the past, but for many of us this was our first experience working in this medium.  We learned to file the soapstone to make it into the shapes we wanted, then we had to buff it to get all the marks off and make it smooth, and the last step was to carve a design on the feather.  Michael helped us put a hole in our carving.  We all had a lot of fun!  One of the neat things we learned was that the powder from soapstone is what they use to make baby powder!  They just add perfume and they are done.  So we all had very soft hands.

All About Plants

This week we have begun our new Theme Studies focus, Plants and Soils.  

We began our investigations by brainstorming things we already know about plants.  We put this information up on a Need/Have/Are chart on the Smartboard to provide a framework to our thinking.

Next we began learning about the different parts of plants.  We labeled a plant diagram and watched a short video that explained the function of each part of the plant.  This gave us basic knowledge that we could build on.  We are now spending a bit more time on each plant part to learn about it more thoroughly.  Yesterday we learned about roots and how there are two different types of roots, tap and fibrous.  Today we began looking more at stems.  

We began an experiment to see how a stem brings water to the leaves. Each table placed a stalk of celery in a cup of water.  We then added ten drops of red food colouring to the water and stirred.  As a class we came up with three possible hypotheses for our experiment:

1) The celery will absorb the coloured water and turn red.

2) The celery will absorb the water, but not turn red.

3) The holes inside the celery will turn red.

Tomorrow afternoon we will revisit our experiment to see what our results are.

A Jungle Themed Tea and a Mexican Celebration

Today was Fiesta day in Room 20!  We are all finished (except for finishing up our Art pieces), learning about Mexico, so to end our study, we had a fiesta!  We spent the afternoon eating Mexican food, listening to mariachi music, and making pinatas.  It was a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures of us trying the food.  We could sample Mexican rice, refried bean, salsa, and tortilla chips.  Most of us tried the rice, but not all of us were brave enough to try the beans!

Here we are making our pinatas!

Here are some of our finished pinatas. They turned out great!

This morning was our Volunteer Tea.  This year's theme was "We are Wild About our Volunteers", or a jungle theme.  Our class, along with Room 24, performed the Katy Perry Song "Roar".  Everyone did an amazing job!

Fiestas!

Hola!  It’s time for a celebration, or as people say in Mexico, a fiesta.  Mexican people have celebrations for people’s birthdays and they play all types of games.  On a child’s birthday they are woken up by a mariachi band playing outside their window.  After dinner, the Mexican kids can hit a piñata.  Whoever breaks it gets the first bag of Mexican treats.  Yummy!

On The Day of the Dead, Mexican people go to a graveyard to celebrate the people in their families who have died.  They light candles for them and put flowers by their graves.  After they have a picnic.  The kids like it because they get candy!

Did you know Christmas in Mexico lasts for a whole week?  On December 16, they begin their Christmas with a posada, which is a play.  The posada is performed every night until December 25.  Following the play, children break open piñatas filled with toys and treats.

From Room 20