"Audiences Interpret the Arts Differently"

This week students had the chance to interpret many kinds of art.  They were exposed to graffiti, cross-stitching, painting, narrative writing, photography, sculpture, and knitting by welcoming various parents and teachers into our classroom.  In addition, the boys and girls were exposed to other forms of art, whereby they were to focus on, using their observation and presenting skills.  Giving such exposure to students opens their world.  Our next step will be to have the children begin to produce their own art.  As you are probably aware from discussions at home, your child has been thinking and writing about their memories they have.  The goal will be for each student to produce three pieces of art, using three different art forms about their chosen memory.  Our plan will be to have a full-on art exhibit in about 3 weeks.  I will have more information about this at a later date.

We have connected our work in math to our unit of inquiry as well.  Tessellation is an art form which depends on geometric shapes to make patterns.  The picture below is a work in progress which promises to become a beautiful piece of art, but more importantly, the student will develop awareness about how tessellations work.

In math we have also been hard at work with fractions. At this stage in their development, students are learning the difference between expressing fractions from a set of units, and a whole unit.  Of course, it is tricky to understand that the larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.  We use a lot of manipulatives to gain understanding about size of fractions.

In language we have been working on parts of speech, practicing cursive writing, doing our collaborative reading in groups, and our editing/revising for their Rainbow Sheep stories.  The latter is proving to be a very challenging task, as they are experiencing what writers go through by having to do several re-writes and considerable revisions.  Much work remains to be done, but I am seeing progress in their writing skills.  We will begin to explore poetry this week coming up.

Three important pieces of information

• We have a field trip planned for Feb 21st to the Hasti Imam Complex for an exposure to Uzbek Art.  A permission form and more information will go home early this week.
• Tuesday is the toy and book sale.  Tomorrow, (Monday) we are still accepting gently used books and toys for donation.  Be sure to return  the permission form if your child is able to attend the movie night on Tuesday evening.
•  Friday, Feb 16 is a holiday.