While Campus School was doing their introductory lessons with Mrs. Chang, Walter Hill students created projects for Dot Day in celebration of The Dot by Peter Reynolds. Students used positive and negative space, repetition, and various other techniques to create dot paintings. I should have hyped this more than I did, but it was on short notice. Next year, we'll have a bigger Dot Day event.
since our last week was so short, we just did some fun holiday crafts. most classes made snowflakes, but the 1st graders made snowmen. I gave them a collection of paper squares and their job was to create a snowman. I gave them no instruction and they made some beautiful things!
this was one of our first projects: building castles from shapes. we started by looking at Paul Klee's The Castle and the Sun and built some castles with foam blocks. then we created our own collages. some of these kids got really creative and did some original things!
This lesson is available online, use what you want!
last week, my pre-k class started learning about shapes. they mostly already knew what shapes were and could identify my 6: square, circle, triangle, rectangle, oval and free-form.
the first week, we painted the shapes on paper and outlined them in a different color (this was an extension, the lesson was shorter than i anticipated!).
this week, we practiced making things (houses, cars, rockets, etc) from shapes. first, i demonstrated with my big shapes on the board. then i gave them some wooden blocks to work with. this made the rest of the lesson super easy! these kids already know how to build from blocks because...that's what kids do! so they just connected what they've been doing with shapes. after that, i gave them a black sheet of construction paper and some cut-out shapes. because they just built things with blocks, i didn't need to tell them how to make things using the paper. they caught on immediately! yay connections!
