Expressing Ourselves!

I hope you enjoyed the pictures from our learning last week. You should be proud of your children from their performance at the Winter Concert!  I'd like to give a big shout-out to the music teachers Ms. Alicia and Ms. Thurow!

We are learning to express ourselves!  That is what we are learning.  As we embark on this new Unit of Inquiry, (UOI) there is much to do before we actually begin producing art.  First, we are investigating the very definition of art.  We are learning that it is music, drama, song, poetry, dance, painting, drawing, sculpture, and indeed many other forms of visual art.  More importantly we are learning that it is the culmination of what it means to be creative.  We are creative when we produce art, but we know that you don't always have to produce art to be creative.  In this UOI we are developing our observing skills, such as when we observe and interpret various forms of art.  As we have different opinions and perspectives, we all have different appreciations for art, and some may even question as to whether they are even observing a piece of art! We are developing presenting skills--by presenting our opinions, or describing our art to others, again, using our unique perspectives.  Finally we are learning to synthesize, blend, combine our creative resources into our own pieces of art.  This is  one of the best UOIs of the entire year in my view, and students really engage in it freely and enthusiastically.

In math this week we wound up our work with direction, graphs and locating positions using coordinates.  On Friday we changed course to investingate fractions, beginning with defining and building understanding by contrasting and comparing sets and whole parts.

In language arts the students worked hard on their Rainbow Sheep stories.  They are learning that publishing a book is hard work, and that it is not easy being authors.  We began what we hope is a concerted effort as part of the writing process, which will culminate in publishing our own books within the next 6 weeks.  Last week we began a series of stations, which we will do on a weekly basis, where we focus on writing conventions such as punctuation and upper/lower case; the use of interesting words, text and literary tools; as well as logical story development and sequence.