January Gotcha Celebration

Schools are a community, and teachers must work together to offer constancy to all students within the school environment. Students must be held accountable for their behavior anywhere on the school's property; not just their homeroom. At B.T.Washington, students only come to the art room 1-2 times per week. It is vital that students have the same expectations in the art room as they would have in any other place within the school. B.T.Washington has a system in place that they call the High Fives. Students are to "be respectful", "be responsible", "be there and be ready", "be safe", and "follow directions" in all locations of the school. There are rewards to following these five simple rules, and today marks one such occasion. At the end of each month, students that have earned themselves a set number of Gotchas get to attend a 45-minute trip to the Gotcha Celebration. Gotchas are paper tokens that student can earn daily be being recognized for their High Five behavior. This is part of B.T.Washington's positive reinforcement strategy.
I got to help set up the gym for the Gotcha Celebration. They were assembling new activities, and one of these was a Fishing for Prizes activity that needed a banner made of blue paper to represent water. The activity would consist of students using "fishing poles" to hang over the blue banner. Behind this banner would be a teacher and some prizes. When the fishing pole is hung over the banner, the teacher would put a prize on the end of the pool. I had about 10 minutes to put this together.
While the event was going on, I was in the art room. The students that had not collected enough Gotchas to be able to attend the event got to be in the art room watching different educational videos. While the videos proved to be entertaining, these students were not happy to be in here. Thankfully, Mrs. Smith was there monitoring the more naughty groups.
One thing that surprised me was that some of the students that had caused a lot of trouble over the last couple weeks were able to attend the Gotcha Celebration. Mrs. Carey and I discussed this can came to the conclusion that students that are sent out of the classroom to talk to Mrs. Smith, the school's discipline manager, should have the additional consequence of having to collect at least 5 more Gotchas than the medium the rest of the students have to achieve. For example, if the medium is 80 for the month of January and you were sent to Mrs. Smith twice, you would need to collect 90.

2nd graders recognizing emotions with warm & cool colors

Prior to today I had been team teaching, but today is different. Today I led my first lesson with the 2nd graders. I started by reading the book "The Way I Feel" by Janan Cain. I had the students look at the facial expressions and the use of color as I read, then talked with the students about some of the more expressive pages. I had them look at the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth on these faces. I didn't talk about the hair, though it is very expressive in this book. The most important thing from them to recognize is the faces, as they will be drawing faces today that have different emotions. The color is important too. Warm colors with an angry face emphasizes the emotion, as blood goes to your face if you get very mad. While cool colors with scares shows you are trying to stay under the radar... or that "you were so scared the color drained from your face" can be expressed with toning down colors with white. Before having the students go to their seats, I went over illustrating these emotions on the Smartboard. I had students put "angry eyebrows" on a face and so on. Once every student had a turn, I showed them their handout. I told them that I expected them to draw two different faces with two different emotions. They needed to write the emotion on the provided space, select if they thought warm or cool colors described the emotion best, and describe a time when they felt that emotion. While the last wasn't always successfully answered, the faces were very fun to see.

Reading Recovery Banner

The other day I completed the reading recover banner, and I emailed the file to the teacher. This morning she brought it in to show to me and Mrs. Carey. She also invited me to attend the event.

Still Life resource

National Gallery of Art has an amazing Still Life Composer resource that may be integrated into the classroom. I found it particularly useful with a Smartboard, as each student may add an item to a composition. The lesson I used this with was a starting point for the 3rd grade's still life project. The skills that they needed to recognize for the project was overlapping objects, foreground/middle ground/background, and that items in the background are usually going to be smaller. Below is an example of a composition made at the National Gallery of Art.

2nd graders recognizing warm and cool colors

Today the second graders were shown warm and cool color palettes. One of the classes had begun the last lesson looking at facial expressions, and we were attempting to get across an understanding that colors can express emotion too. While most of the faces were not as successful as we had hoped, it motivated a change in approach. So today's 2nd grade class were shown the color palettes and asked to paint a 12" x 18" sheet of paper using only cool colors. When they completed that, they were to paint one using only warm colors. They were to practice blending and making brush strokes, while also keeping the paint on the palette clean. I used these sheets for the display outside of the art room, with the anticipation of removing them once the project hey are intended for – the Emotional Face Collage – progresses into its later stage. The point being made with the display is that artists use colors to express emotion.