Art and Gym

Hey there! It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about Grade 3/4 life because life has been nothing but busy these last few weeks. I’m still figuring out where my students are at and seeing where I want to go (aka making my long range plans) with the two curriculums this year. As you know, I’ve put a big focus on community building so that we have a safe and comfortable learning environment. We’ve spent a lot of time in the past two weeks talking about the 6 learning goals (responsibility, independent work, collaboration, initiative, organization, and self-regulation). For some of these lessons, we just had discussions. For some, I did a read aloud. For organization, we had a much needed desk clean out. Did I mention I’m a neat freak?

(Collaboration)

(Self-Regulation)

Art

I like to start the school year off with an easy element of art: line. We made our name posters using a technique I found HERE. I don’t have pictures, but they turned out great!

Then we explored dot art because September 15^th was International Dot Day. YouTube has The Dot online so we watched the story before we made our dot art.

In another art lesson, I read this book. It’s illustrated by students who use the same line to make a totally different picture.

My Grade threes and fours then had to take two different lines and make a different picture out of each. They got really creative!

Gym

We are continuing  play cooperative games. Have you ever played Chuck the Chicken? If not, you should. It’s fun and hilarious. I first played myself a few years ago when I was doing a team building session with some coworkers. It’s a little confusing to describe (especially to kids) so I showed my class the video before we went out to play. Click the picture to go to the link.

Looks like fun, right? My class had a blast. We talked about how the same person couldn’t always be the last one in line to chuck the chicken for the other team, so it was interesting to see who was able to take turns easily, who was a leader, and who was able to follow instructions.

And the best part of all…the kids thought the chicken’s name was Chuck; they didn’t quite realize that “Chuck” is more of a verb in this case. Oh well.