Poppies

This lesson on painting poppies from Flanders Field focused on perspective. After viewing and discussing real photographs of Flanders Field in Belgium the children were ready to recreate their own realistic poppy fields using perspective. 

The backgrounds were quickly shaded in using unwrapped blue crayons. 

Large (up close) poppies were painted in organic shapes, followed by medium sized ones (farther away) and finally small (distant) ones. Black centres were added and then they were left to dry overnight. 

Green pastels in varying shades filled in the spaces to add greenery and grass to the fields. White and yellow oil pastels highlight the poppy centres. 

Hits of pink, yellow and blue paint add some colour and dimension to the pieces. Q-tips were perfect for adding this pop of colour. 

They are gorgeous. Amazing what small hands can do. The children really embraced the focus of this lesson and their final work demonstrates a solid understanding of using perspective and depth to create a realistic rendering. 

This class is so enthusiastic about art and are such patient and thoughtful artists. Our classroom is the calmest and quietest when they are immersed in creative, visual expression. It's a special thing and makes me happier than you know (I adore art especially when done with love by children). 

Their poppies offered a stunning  backdrop for the Remembrance Day assembly on Wednesday.

Thank you for your donations to the Poppy Fund. The children were pleased to contribute their coins into the collection tin this week. 

The children sang, Light a Candle, and recited the poem Poppy Poppy beautifully at the assembly. Well done Division 3. 

Halloween Fun

The children were so excited to come to school dressed up in their costumes. They looked fantastic! The costume parade was a big success and lots of fun was had by all. 

In the afternoon the children rotated through stations in the classroom. There was drawing/colouring, recipe and snack making/eating, counting, bingo, and everyday word hunts. They were so focused and enjoyed all the activities. The apples smiles were a hit. Jam was the filling of choice. A few opted for the cream cheese and the marshmallow teeth, well...yum! The jam made the smiles a little creepy too!

Creepy Carrots

Huge Peter Brown fan. Love all of his books! I couldn't find Creepy Carrots in the school library when I went looking and then noticed that one of our students had borrowed it during Book Exchange. Someone has good taste! I snatched it up in time for Halloween. 

Although not a traditional Halloween story, it has elements of suspense and the creepy factor is high. I love the unexpected twist at the end. Jasper, the main character, is satisfied he's solved his problem with the creepy carrots but we also see the carrots perspective and they feel equally accomplished and celebratory with the outcome too. It challenges the reader to rethink the events from the carrots point of view. 

It's also uber fun to create creepy carrots of your own, which is exactly what we did next. Paper, scissors and glue and we were good to go. The expressions are pretty priceless! Some creepy, some happy, some downright hilarious. 

Fall Collections and Patterning

Our fall table began as a simple collection of leaves and has been growing and changing ever since. Stones, seeds, seed pods, pinecones, glass beads and buttons are perfect for nature inspired patterning and storytelling. 

Nighttime Pumpkins

Love this project! We read Lio Lionni's book, Little Blue and Little Yellow, about two best friends. One day when they snuck out to be together they hugged and Little Blue and Little Yellow turned green! Our painting challenge involved drawing realistic looking pumpkins and painting them using only red, yellow and blue paint! 

This excited them and they were anxious to begin. The mixing was not to happen in the paint palette rather on their paper! Working on using long brushstrokes or ribbons of paint, they blended the red and yellow to make beautiful shades of orange. For the leaves, they dipped into the tiniest amount of blue and layered yellow to create varying shades of green. The stem was a mix of all three colours. 

The following day, they cut out their leaves and pumpkins and glued them on black construction paper. Using chalk pastels soft, glowing moons and stars were added to illuminate the night skies. Tendrils were created by rolling long strips of green paper and pipe cleaners around their pencils. 

Counting Collections

This week I introduced Counting Collections in Math. Students are partnered up and given a collection of objects to count together. Sounds simple, right? Important skills and understandings are developed through opportunities to count. As adults, we count with ease and it's hard to recall the complexity of skills involved in learning to count and making sense of quantity. Children develop important number concepts including:

• naming numbers
• sequencing numbers - ordering number names
• name and symbol relation - writing numbers 
• one to one correspondence - saying a number name for each object
• cardinality - the last number said is the total
• relative size - which is bigger
• base ten structure - how numbers go together (written and verbal)
• efficiency and accuracy - grouping objects to count and record efficiently
• representations - communicating ideas in words, numbers and drawings  

We kicked off with a read aloud by Lizann Flatt called Counting on Fall. If poses the question, what if animals and plants knew math like you? Would leaves fall in patterns? Would squirrels gather nuts in groups of five? Would birds always fly in flocks of ten? This got them thinking about strategies they use to count and what their eyes recognize at a glance. They were eager to start counting.

Having the students work in partners encourages dialogue and problem solving through the sharing of ideas and strategies. Teamwork allows students to learn from each other, build confidence and promotes risk taking. Here are the collections they could choose from. All of the collections, to start, were between 20 and 60. We will build up to larger collections in the hundreds over time.

They quickly got to work and it was easy to observe which strategies they were most comfortable with and what posed challenges.

This group arranged the clothes pins into groups of ten and counted 10, 20 and then counted on 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. When asked to count a different way they grouped them into fives.

This group went for pairs and skip counted by twos to 24. Skip counting to ten was easy, but was harder to 20 and more difficult after 20.

Another group opted for pairs to count the pompoms although they had to start over a couple of times because they lost count and couldn't remember which ones they had counted.

The buttons were grouped into rows of ten although they were tricky to count because they were so close together. 

This group also counted the pencil crayons by ones and chose to organize them in a circle to keep track.

The mini pompoms were counted first by ones, but that wasn't working well so they switched to groups of ten. There was one left over.

We reviewed and shared the strategies they used as a group and the following day talked about which strategies worked well and why. They determined that the larger the collection, the larger the groups. The smaller the collection, the smaller the groups. They also decided that you could start by twos and then regroup them into piles of ten from there. The second day, new partners and new collections provided new challenges. 

Next week, we'll add representation, having the students communicate and record their counting using words, numbers and drawings. 

Moonsquirters

The BC School Fruit and Vegetable Nutrition Program delivers healthy produce for students across British Columbia once a month. It was Fruit and Veggie day at school on Wednesday. Volunteer parents delivered six containers of delicious cherry tomatoes to our classroom. I passed the tomatoes out at lunch. I heard more, "no thank-yous" than "yes pleases" which reminded me of the perfect book for this veggie day!!! It took me a while to dig it out of my collection at lunch, but eventually I found it. We settled at the carpet for a story in the afternoon, inspired by tomatoes.

You can listen and watch a video of the story below! 

https://www.schooltube.com/video/77bd5e4a6a3fa612c522/

Here is the link to the BC Fruit and Veggie Program if you're interested.

http://www.sfvnp.ca