imPRESS me

This week LaMonique and I introduced printmaking.  I took lead and started the lesson by asking questions about machines, since the students prints were going to be of what they think a dance machine is and will be making next week with clay.  Some questions I asked were what are machines? What do machines look like? Can machines dance? Then we showed a video of Nick Cave and his sound suits.  I asked what they like about it and if they could hear the sound.  I then connected it to how machines make sound.  We also showed a Wall-E video which they LOVED.   Then we had ten minutes of center play where LaMonique did a quick demonstration of our oil pastel center where they made "prints" without ink.  The other three centers were the book center where they also got to build their dance machines, the projector center where they used mechanical objects and traced them on the wall and the drawing center where they used permanent markers on canvas. During this time we played Michael Jackson's Dance Machine. After center play we had snack time and then a powerpoint full of images of prints and Nick Cave's sound suits.  I asked which ones they liked and Sofia said to one of our slides, " I don't like this because it doesn't look like anything."  but then when we showed the sound suits she loved those.  We then split the class into two groups to do demonstrations of printmaking.  I had the students tell me what to draw on my meat tray and then showed them how to make the indentation. Then I showed how to use the rollers and ink and had them count to ten when I rolled the ink on. I had them do the same thing when I pressed the paper onto the ink.   After the demonstrations were done the students got to do their own prints (up to 4) and when they were done they got to go to center play.  With 15 minutes left we played the clean up song and had them come back to the carpet.  Then I asked if they had fun and what they like about the day.  Allison said, "I liked it because it was just fun."  Then they started to tell us what centers they liked best which were the oil pastel and drawing center.  Once our discussion was done we had a dance party and started a train around the room. The kids loved it! I think this week went well especially with our observers in the classroom.  Hopefully next week goes just as good!