Saturday was the last Saturday School of the semester, so for the last day of class, we wanted to do a very fun lesson so we had our students make art work out of string and yarn. At first it was a bit challenging trying to come up with ideas and lessons for the students. But after several brainstorms, we came up with 5 activities including the big activity of the day. So we focused on lines, forms and shapes and how string can make all of these things. To help students to further understand the connection between string and line, we showed students a short clip from Harold and the Purple Crayon. It’s an awesome clip and I’m starting to fall in love with the book and the cartoon!
Afterwards, we let students play in the centers:
Silly String Art
Nail Board String Art
Shadow Play
Projection Center
As you can see, the students had a blast playing with different lines and shapes in each of the centers. There’s a lot of colors and I bet there’s some interesting stories behind each of the art works.
Following center time was snack and then the Big Activity of the day. Continuing with the concept of line, form, and shapes, students made a collaborative string. The students layered various types of yarn of different color on top of a large black canvas that had strips of velcro on it. By using velcro, the students were able to stick the yarn in place of the canvas without it falling off.
So in this image above, my mentor and 2 other students are creating an incredible art work that tells an amazing story. So in this piece, the students are creating a maze or an obstacle course that has so many hidden passageways and such. The middle section that has very few yarn is a “force field” which protects people that are in the obstacle from all the bad guys. I’m just incredibly amazed how young minds have such great ways of thinking and telling their stories.
This is an image of a shark (the purple yarn that’s an upside down “Y”) that eats the bad guys. This shark is part of the obstacle art piece. Also, this particular student has amazing art works. He draws in the style of comic books with sections and chapters (and mind you that this student is 5 years old!) A majority of his drawings are of aliens and other creatures that fight good and bad guys (and the good guys always win).
On top of all the fun lessons and activities, we had a couple of guest speakers stop by to talk to the students. The guest speakers previously filmed one of our class for an assignment. They came back to show some of the clips that they took of the students. The film crew acted as paparrazi's for a day and they showed clips of some of the students performance and behavior in class. The guests asked students questions pertaining to the video clips. This took about 20 minutes to do, and since a good amount of time was taken from our day, we had to take out our powerpoint and shorten a bit of things to fit our guest speakers in for the day. Surprisingly, everything worked out and the students had a really good time.
So this was the last lesson of the 8 lessons for the unit. I learned so much about teaching thus far and I know that there are going to be more things that I will learn. This was a great opportunity for me to see where I am as a teacher and how I can encourage people to think outside of the box and also for my students to encourage me to do the same.
I'm introducing the Big Activity of the day: yarn art on velcro. The students were so eager to participate in the activity (as you can see by Autumn's unpleasant look after Trinity crushed her just so she could see the table)
Lacey helping Anja and Autumn with the string design over by the Nail Board String Art center.
Poppy, Allison, Tyler, and Jin Gyo having fun in their soundsuits over by the shadow play center. Poppy was taking a picture of me while I was taking a picture of her. Jin Gyo was fixing Tyler's hair in the back.
Shannon just loves to dress up and pretend to be a kitty. Instead of placing the yarn on the black canvas and velcro, she wrapped the yarn on her hands and feet. And then crawled on the floor as if she was a cat. 
No comments:
Post a Comment