Saturday, September 14, 2013

Make Your Mark, prt I

I decided this year to use Peter H. Reynolds' "Creatrilogy" for the first month, hemhem...3 rotations of school to "introduce" the kids to the most used media in the Art room.  And to participate in International Dot Day.
If you're not in the loop, Peter H. Reynolds' "Creatrilogy" has three great books in it, "The Dot," "Ish," and, "Sky Color".  (More on the "Ish" and "Sky Color" later)
Each year there's a celebration for the first release of "The Dot" around September 15th.  It's called International Dot Day and is a world wide thing.  My school is just a small chunk of the participation.  But we make our marks.  You can find more on their site or their Facebook page.

The kids all love "The Dot" which is about a little girl named Vashti who learns to make her mark.  I read it to them last year as well, so most already know it and the project.  I read (or in the case of some of the bigger kids, I tried to get "willing" readers and did reader's theater) "The Dot" and we made our marks.  This year I forced them to only use crayons, not so happy campers in my room, but I showed them how to layer colors lightly or get bright, bold color, so it wasn't all grumbles.  I did let them use other media (markers, why do they all love and only love the markers) when they turned in their "dot."

I was amazed at how well some of them thought outside the box.  As is the case, most ended up looking very similar to mine, even when I told them "It all starts with a dot, so anything goes!"  I did have an amazing kindergartner and fifth grader.
This is my first year seeing kindergarten as much as I do, I try to remember where they're at developmentally, sometimes I want them to do more than they can.  This one blew me away!


The fifth grader I knew was good already, but she just proved that I should do more for/with her.

These ended up as the first thing on my new to me bulletin boards.  I have six boards in the Library, they used to be our Star Writers, but we're not doing it this year and they became mine.  They are more like mini boards, than a full board.  This first go around, I used one for each grade K-5, but I think that the Kinder board will end up being the "What we did" board.  The Kindergarteners really want to take their art home then and there and I really do feel that they should "make and take."  I am trying to teach them to be patient by having the projects last two days, not one.  The big kids projects last at least four days.
I use ROY G BV to organize my grade levels: Kinder is red, 5th purple/violet.

Kinder

1st Grade

2nd Grade

3rd Grade

4th Grade

5th Grade

I didn't have a chance to strip them to the board and put up what I wanted as a background and border since I thought I had a week to put them up before the Library was in use for parent classes, I didn't.  Yeah, they went up in 90 minutes Tuesday for Tuesday after school.  Only thing I did was pull down what was on them and put up my stuff.  They're not bad, but not what I want.  When these come down I'll strip them to the bare board and put up my backing and border since there will be more time. Since the boards are so tiny, I'm now worried that I'll only get one piece from each class up.  That's not a problem in K, 4th or 5th grade where there are only 5 classes per grade.  1st grade has eight classes, 2nd has seven and 3rd has six.  Five 9x12 pieces sort of fit okay on a board with a little (okay a lot) of overlap.  Gah!  Who knew bulletin boards would be so organizationally difficult.  Can't I just slap something up and call it done?  No?

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