Mexico, Snowmen, and Seuss Oh My!

So a lot has been happening this week, we are in the middle of our Social Studies Unit on Mexico, and we painted ponchos on Tuesday, and we had a Mexican Market today. The ponchos are 12"x18" pieces of art paper that we painted stripes on with watercolour paper. Next week we will tape the two papers together, cut out a head hole and Voila! Poncho-riffic!

 The Mexican Market is where students bring small items from home (toys, books, candy, cookies etc.) and trade them with the other kids for things that they want. Students are not quite sure about it at the beginning (they don't always want to part with their things) but by the end they are over the moon excited about their new treasures.

This week we also had the Spanish 11 class bring 4 pinatas to our campus for our class and another grade two class to break open. They taught us the pinata breaking song, and we had a lot of fun hitting the pinatas, it was a little wild but so worth it!

Our second art project this week was the first project in our unit on perspective. We made torn paper snowmen. It is amazing how hard tearing paper is for 7/8 year olds! But they always end up looking great!  It's amazing how many expressions snowmen have!!

sad/troubled snowman

 content/reflective snowman

We also started our Dr. Seuss Author study. We are working on rhyming words, and using our imagination to create fantastical objects/animals. We worked on creating our own zoos after reading "If I Ran the Zoo"

I can't wait to see them when they are finished, but we had a lot of giggles and sharing happening during this activity!

A New Year and Patterns

So we started the week off with patterns in Math, and our culminating activity was making a quilt block. We were able to talk about symmetry and design as well. It was hard for some of the more spatially challenged to place the triangle pieces correctly, but in the end I think that they are quite stunning and the prep for them was very minimal!! The dimensions are 2" squares cut from coloured photocopy paper and 11" square from white photocopy paper and a 12" piece of construction paper. The students needed 4 squares of one colour and 7 squares of another colour. I had them fold the white paper in half both ways to create a centre line, then they could line up the points of the diamonds with the centre and the line. The triangles were harder to explain, so I went around and showed them one if they couldn't get it. Next week we are starting our math rotation for measurement. I will be doing the measuring weight strand and the other two are doing linear measurement and capacity. (More to follow on that). 

We also wrote some new year's goals. I stole borrowed two ideas from two amazing sites (via pinterest of course) and mashed them together with a little tweaking for this project. 

The students used 2013 as the number of examples they needed to provide for each goal.

They wrote 2 ways they could be a better student, something they wanted to try and do more often or better, 1 person they want to get to know better, and 3 ways they could be a better friend.

Then they coloured in a new years hat, and drew a face, I added a little noise maker when I put them on the wall. Pretty cute, and a good way to start the year, thinking about little (but concrete) ways to be a better them.