Halloween, Patterning, Creepy Writing and Picasso, of course.

Dear Parents,

It's been a while since I've had a chance to update, so this is a bit of an omnibus post. We had a great Halloween yesterday and I thought, first, I'd post a class photo Mr. D took of our guys in the stairwell.

We've been getting up to gear these past few weeks, finishing our Number Sense and Numeration unit and beginning our Patterning and Algebra unit. Students have taken home all their worksheets from this unit and I sent home the practice test early last week, after we'd taken it up and then did a second test with them on Friday. Because so much of Grade One is learning how to learn, it's interesting to see who improved after review, and who still needs practice.

In our patterning unit, we are taking specific patterns (ABBA, ABCA, ABBBB, etc) and deliberately practicing making them with a variety of materials to show that the same pattern might look different but is really the same.

In language, we've read a slew of "scary" books like The Dark, Creepy Carrots and Creepy Underpants these past couple of weeks. Students have continued to do Reading Responses to these books, and we're beginning to do some art and more serious writing about the connections we can make between books and student experiences. You can come read this bulletin board in person to find out what each student thinks is the creepiest and what they plan to do about it.

 We did some art reflections about another book, They All Saw A Cat, which was about different perspectives on a single object: how it can look different depending on who is looking. It's a beautiful book and students enjoyed talking about it, but many had difficulty with the shifting perspective in their own work.

So we've moved on to Picasso and some play with shapes and abstraction.

I love doing Picasso based work around Halloween, because students enjoy the strangeness of his vision. Our portraits were inspired by the cubist idea of capturing motion, so students layered a side view of their faces with a front view.  Some students were frustrated by not being able to embellish their work with pencils and markers, but it's good to play with different materials and limits, I think. The results were pretty neat.

Students enjoyed working with the variety of papers, especially the metallic ones

Some added framing elements, others tried to make it look as "normal" as possible

I liked this ones use of tongue and nostrils

Some are definitely more abstract than others

This one is eating an ice cream cone

This one took a mistaken cut and incorporated it into the work

This one did some neat things with layers, I thought

I'm also posting to remind you that our timeline projects are due tomorrow. Good luck with the final touches. Please do let me know if there are any last minute issues or questions.

Sincerely, 

Ms. Goegan