Tuesday, December 13, 2016

This Week in Room 6: Plasticine Art

Earlier in the year, our students completed a literacy adventure during Read In week organized by our school's wonderful librarian. The kids rotated through a variety of stations, one of them being  plasticine art inspired by author and illustrator Barbara Reid. This was something that had been done in previous years and was a huge hit with the students. The plasticine station (Artist's Island) ended up being in my classroom and I was definitely on crowd control trying to count 30 little people to let in (there were just so many kiddos and not enough room!!). The kids were so eager to create a plasticine art piece that I decided to take this activity and have my Kindergarten students complete it as their holiday gift to their families! Not only is the plasticine lots of fun to play with, it is also an excellent way to help develop and build muscle strength in those tiny little hands! Win win!
We used cavases from the dollar store but a strong piece of cardboard would work as well. I got a few different Christmas cutters from Michaels to help the kids with creating some shapes and to give them a basis to work from. The plasticine was precut and each group received a little bit of each colour!

Before beginning, I shared with the students different strategies to spread their plasticine. We discussed how our pictures were going to be layered and we first needed to create a background. We also talked about how a little bit goes a long way and I demonstrated this for them to see how I spread the plasticine. We then got to work!

Some students decided to do a number of colours where others chose to do one or two.
Here were the final products! Some kids used a lot of colour and detail where as some did a more simple piece. I love how they all turned out!
We've wrapped them up using tissue paper and put them into some beautifully decorated gift bags, along with some cute cards we made earlier in the month! The kids are looking forward to bringing them home this week and giving them to their families.

Merry Christmas!

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

This Week in Room 6: Gingerbread Friends

Happy December!

Today I'm sharing an idea that I recently did with my grade 3 health students! We've been spending some time discussing qualities that we appreciate in friends (this is something I do at the beginning of the year when we do our "getting to know you" activities, but it is something I like to constantly revisit as a reminder).

With Christmas right around the corner, we created "Gingerbread Friends". As a class, we brainstormed a number of qualities we would like to have in a friend and that we feel are important for us to demonstrate as well. We worded it to finish the phrase, "Being a good friend means:".

Some of our ideas included:
  • caring for others
  • telling the truth
  • including everyone
  • treating others how you want to be treated
We tried to word our ideas positively; when students would say "not saying mean things", I would ask them to reword it so that we were saying the things a good friend WOULD do, rather than what they SHOULDN'T do.

After students had their idea, they received a gingerbread man template on brown construction paper where they wrote down what being a good friend meant to them. They then decorated them and I cut them out to display on the bulletin board outside of my classroom!
Now, where do you put 21 Gingerbread Friends?! On a giant gingerbread house, of course! Thanks to pinterest, I was able to get a few different ideas and here was the final product! (This took much longer than I would like to admit) :)
Here is the completed board!
Happy holidays from the Gingerbread Friends in room 6!