Light!

I have really enjoyed taking photos with my phone lately. Photos are used to capture the True Artist's beauty. On the way to field one morning, I couldn't help but notice the beautiful sunrise. However, it was in my rearview mirror the whole trip. I decided to whip out my phone and capture it's beauty. (AT A STOP LIGHT WHEN IT WAS SAFE!)

I find this picture to be really awesome. You have the nice warm colors of the sunrise in the mirror and the drabby dark colors behind it. It is all about perspective ;)

Social Studies Lesson 2

Our third and final social studies lesson was conducted by having the students gain “new freedoms”. This lasted for 5 to 10 minutes and some students received better freedom’s than their peers, making it unfair for some. This experience allowed the students relate to the reasons why the bill of rights were written to give the us people fair and protected rights. This led to the discussion of the 10 amendments, where we played a video that took Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off song and turned it into a Bill of Rights Parody. The students could either draw or write the 10 amendments in a way that they could remember. We ended the lesson by having the students write a letter to the Forefathers, thanking them for the rights they created.

Bill of Rights (SHAKE IT OFF PARODY)

Social Studies Lesson 2

For our second lesson, we chose to use a video to spin it off. The video was used to encourage the students to build their side to a debate. Our video was a news story on a student who had severe food allergies. These food allergies caused the school to enforce new hand washing and snack rules that interrupted the other students’ learning time.

The students were able to connect with the story because it was based on things they are familiar with like school, and the young girl was around their age. That being said, the students were able to make connections and see perspective when building their argument on this case. It was really fun and interesting to hear all of the things the students had to say about their side of the argument. We used a really great graphic organizer to help the students build their argument.

Building and Argument

Social Studies Lesson 1

For my integrated social studies lesson this semester, I collaborated with Erin, Kylie, and Kiersten. We decided to write 3 lessons that correlated together. Our first lesson encouraged the students to see what it was like to develop a government from scratch. To do this, we set up the scene by pretending that we were on an airplane that crashed on to an island. We told the students that we were never going to be rescued so we have to figure out what to do next. The students moved from talking about survival skills to discussing important aspects of government. Aspects like laws, police, leader, judge, etc. This was a very interesting lesson. I learned that our group of students are can get very passionate when explaining their ideas. It was fun to see students get so engaged, however, the students were not quit ready for this type of setting. It went from polite sharing of ideas to an argumentative debate. Erin and I both agreed that if this was our own classroom, we would have ended the lesson as soon as it got chaotic. We would then attempt it again until the students were able to handle that type of learning environment.

Classroom Management Strategies

Comments on Classroom Governments

Andy Warhol/Pop Art Lesson 4th/5th Grade

For my full week in field, I was asked to do an art lesson. I looked through a list of art projects they had already done, as well as artists they have already learned about. I finally decided to do Pop Art inspired by Andy Warhol. I used this Marilyn Manroe piece to inspire the students. I made a Prezi presentation to talk about Andy Warhol and Complementary Colors.
My Pop Art/Complementary Colors Prezi

Here are some pictures of my students' work. They all had a blast doing this and they did wonderful jobs.

Soap Carving

After reading Becoming Naomi Leon by Pam Muñoz Ryan we had an opportunity to do soap carving similar to the carvings that Naomi loved to do. I remember looking at the bar of soap and contemplating where to start. I don't know how I ended up with a bear, but I did. We talked about afterwards how it reminds us of the tree carving off of day road that has bears in it. This was an interesting assignment because I had never done anything like this before. In a way it was relaxing and afterwards my hands smelt very clean :)

Incredible Soap Carving Art

How to Make Soap Carving

Pinterest Soap Carving

Fourth Visual Arts Project

For my final visual arts project, I chose collage. For this project, I chose to use buttons!!

I got ideas from sights like this....
Jennifer McGuire Ink

Pinterest

For my last project I chose to do a collage. I originally thought about doing a picture collage, but then I found a bag of mixed buttons while shopping. I thought that I could use this to make a collage of some sort. I experimented with laying them out on different pieces of paper. I tried making a flower to stick with my flower theme, but I was not happy with it. Eventually I started by drawing the outline of a fish and using the different smaller buttons to look like fish scales. I thought it looked pretty cool, so I ran with this idea. There were some gaps in the fish that I filled in with glitter because I didn’t like seeing the paper through the fish. Overall I think this was a good experience because I had never done anything like this before. I think that instead of the typical macaroni art projects that most students do, investing in a big bag of mixed buttons, students will be able to express more creativity with all of the different available colors.