Animal Habitat Dioramas

Firstly, a huge thank you to all the parents who helped their child get ready for this week of building!!

Students spent the week creating their habitat for their chosen animal.  The shoe boxes went from a plain old box to a wonderful home for their plasticene animals.

I hope you agree … here they are …

These are on display on two tables in the hallway outside of our classroom and in the display case on the second floor.  I hope you get a chance to see them when you are in the school.  These pictures don’t really do the work justice, especially the glare from the display case glass 🙂

I hope you enjoy them as much as the kids did making them!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easter

I hope you all have a fantastic long weekend. Schools will reopen on Tuesday, April 18th.

This week we spent some time talking about Easter – its origin (Christianity) and the ancient Anglo Saxon tradition of Eastre (a spring celebration) which brought us the Easter Bunny.  We read, The Velveteen Rabbit, (my Reading group) and Rechenka’s Eggs, by Patricia Polacco, (the whole class) which looked at the tradition of Russian / Ukranian eggs.

The students decorated their own eggs.  Some challenged themselves by doing the design as well as the colouring.

The School Mural Project

We had two different sessions with the artists-in-residence who are coordinating our school-wide mural project.  This mural will be painted on the six panels on the wall in the undercover area by the school’s front door.  Intermediate students will be working on the backgrounds and the primary students will be doing the added details.  These details will be in the form of mandelas – circular pieces of art.

In preparation for this mural the artists came into our class and taught the students about ‘mandelas’.  Mona discussed the theme of nature and introduced the concept of symmetry.  Students were encouraged to make designs which were important to them and representative of themselves.  They began by tracing circles onto their paper. Smaller circles were placed in the centre of these.  Lines were drawn on which dissected these circles.  Designs were created within and without these areas. Students used coloured Sharpie felt pens and special pastels which are a sort of combination of chalk and oil.


 

The artists came back the week later for our second session.  At this time students worked on styrofoam sheets which had circles drawn on them.  Students drew their designs using ballpoint pens which basically carved their designs into the base. Students then chose a coloured paper and an ink.  Using rollers the students covered their designs with the ink and then placed their paper on it.  They needed to rub the two together in order to ensure that a good contact was achieved.  The plates were then peeled off to reveal their print.

When they were dried there were placed on the bulletin board interspersed with their original mandelas.  These will still be on the bulletin board when you come in next week for our Student Led conferences. 

Here are a few of them:

 

 

St. Patrick’s Day

As this holiday will happen while we are on Spring Break we spent some time during the past two weeks doing some Irish activities.

We read some stories and did some art.  Students wrote out three wishes for what they would like if they caught a leprechaun.  They chose their most favourite wish and then created a shamrock depiction of that wish.

We also created layered shamrocks with three sizes of shamrocks on construction paper which were coloured with oil pastels in the shades of blue and green, with some added bits of gold/yellow.

We also have some ‘wee folk’ visiting the classroom.  They seem to like ‘hanging around’ …

May the luck of the Irish be with you.  I hope you all wear some green on March 17th – you wouldn’t want to get pinched …

Burnaby Arts Alive Programme

We spent time during February working on a project for the biennial Arts Alive competition.  This is open to elementary school classes every second year – alternate years with the secondary schools.  Every year there is a set theme.  This year’s theme was, “Place, Home”.

As we have been looking at aboriginal art styles this year we created a project that incorporated the coastline of our glorious province and the four different styles of aboriginal art: North Coast; Mid Coast; West Coast (outer part of Vancouver Island); and South Coast.  Each of the styles have similarities and differences mainly in reference to the shapes and the colours that are used.

Students each chose an animal which they practised drawing on their own.  They made a ‘good copy’ of it and then adorned it with the colours allowed from the style of their animal.

These animals were affixed to a canvas that was transformed into the coastline of BC.  A variety of different students painted (base or mottled top layers), separated cedar fronds, soaked off the title labels, or created the human pictures.  Cedar was chosen as a representation of how important this tree was to aboriginal peoples.  All in all it was a whole class project with everyone doing something to contribute.

Normally for Arts Alive each year every student would create an individual project from class lessons about the year’s theme.  The Jury Panel from the BAG comes to each school on a specific day in the final week and a few of the individual projects would be chosen to be taken to the Burnaby Art Gallery for their annual exhibition.  This year we were asked to do a whole class project with the idea that most, if not all, of the participating classes would have their project taken.

At Rosser our class, along with Divisions 1 and 2, participated this year.  The Jury Panel came on February 28th and each of the three divisions had their projects taken back to the Burnaby Art Gallery.  These collected works will be put on display for the Annual Exhibition.

The Opening Night for this exhibition will be on Thursday, April 13th at 6:00 p.m.  I will be there and I hope some of you can come to see the students’ great work.  The picture here doesn’t really show how great the individual animal pictures are – so seeing them in real life would be best:)

 

 

100’s Day Activities

On Tuesday, February 21st we celebrated the 100th day that we have been in school – not counting weekends and school holidays.  We did all sorts of fun activities including: making Fruit Loop necklaces with ten groups of different colours; headbands with crowns that they did 20 sets of five tally marks on, as well as counting by fives on coloured dots; 100’s day booklets; and our posters – shown here on the bulletin board.

After such a busy day we celebrated 101st day with a watching of the Disney classic cartoon – 101 Dalmatians.