"How We Organize Ourselves" Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community Lines of Inquiry:
We take on roles each day and this helps us build a strong community (responsibility)
"The Curious Garden" by Peter Brown was read to the children to start our collaborative art project this Friday! While out exploring one day, a little boy named Liam discovers a struggling garden and decides to take care of it. Slowly, the garden spreads out and turns the dark, gray city into a lively, green community! At the end of the story, everyone joins Liam to make the city more beautiful and greener. Instead of individual artwork, we decided to create a big garden poster to keep in our classroom. The children were excited to do a multimedia collage, using flowers, leaves, straw and seeds. As well, there were sponge painting with spring colour!
"I will do the stems and you will paint the flowers!"
"How We Organize Ourselves" Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community Lines of Inquiry:
The jobs people do in our community support its development (function)
We take on roles each day and this helps us build a strong community (responsibility)
This Friday morning, we had a wonderful walk in our neighbourhood to look for community helpers. The children saw some construction workers building a house, a dog walker and a mail box where mail carriers collect letter.
As an inspiration for art activity today, we read the book "Whose Gloves Are These?" by Laura Salas. The children learned how some community helpers need special gloves to work. In the discussion during story time, the children shared their thoughts about what would happen without a certain community helper's service. Trystan - "we would have no animal to see in a zoo if there were no zookeepers." Matthew - "Hotel rooms would be so messy if there were no housekeepers." As well, we found that some of our duties at home are similar to the community helpers'. Brendan - "I help picking up dog poo." Francine - "I set up the table at home." Cameron - "I clean up my toys." We are all responsible community helpers at home! After the story and discussion, the children had a hand-on art activity to express their own ideas.
Trace our hands!
Colour or glue tissue paper to decorate the gloves.
"How We Organize Ourselves" Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community Having started with the book, "Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do" by Kathryn Heling, the children had a guessing game about what jobs people do through observing people's uniforms and tools. It was amazing to hear our children have such rich language about occupation. Cameron - People who fix cars are called mechanics. Trystan - Painters are like artists. Bela, Francine and Max - Milkman is one kind of farmer. (We learned the word, dairy farmer!) As the children are expressing a strong interest in firefighters. We decided to follow the children's interests and needs to explore more upon the topic. Before we used different shapes to make a firetruck collage, the children played a shape I spy game as a review of their shapes. With a picture of a fire truck, the children named out the shapes they would need for their fire trucks. Gluing and placing each part of a fire truck into the right position, the children were capable of forming the structure of a fire truck. Moreover, many children had discussions about how firefighters put out fires and save people in a community.
"The ladder needs some steps! "
"Look, these are the wheels on my fire truck. Can you see a hose?"
It was very nice and rewarding to watching the children fully engaged and participated the art activity. Their bright eyes were telling us how much they enjoyed this activity. There will be more extended activities for the children to explore what does a fire fighter do and what other community helpers we have.
"What do you know about the word - community?" the children were asked. Some of the children have heard the word, community; here are their ideas about community: Mila: cute babies Trystan: people Grace: houses Damon: lights Roy: cakes and sprinkles! Then, Trystan wondered "What is community?" It was actually one of the provocations for our next unit of inquiries - "How We Organize Ourselves" Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community This Friday, we had a hand-on art activity to help us accessing what the children know about a community. The children used stamps (made of wooden blocks and string) and paint to build their community scene.
"Slide and swing in my community!"
"Cakes! we need bakery."
"My House ."
"What do we have in our community?"
"I want blue buildings."
Here are the image of the community that the children made on Friday!
Transdisciplinary Theme: Where we are in place and time
Central Idea: There are similarities and differences between the way people lived long ago and the way people live today.
Inventions have been made that impact the things we do
changes in daily life
This Friday, we explored what an invention means for our art activity. Here is the clip of the book "I am inventing an invention" by Grosset & Dunlap and Hill, Samantha. In the video, the children discussed about how peopled live in the olden days with the inventions we have nowadays.
After we watched the video, the children were asked "how do you become an inventor?"
Mila -"we decorate."
Cameron - "we can build things!"
Damon - "you need to be fast!"
Then, we had an hands-on art activity to make an invention plan. An open-ended free collage helped the children to have a visualization of their ideas on a piece of paper.
Being a good communicator, the children verbalized their invention ideas with the teacher and their friends.
"What is this part?"
"My invention is a pen that would follow my to school!"
This is a bike that has a vacuum at the back!
This is my art work!
It was interesting to see that many children adding new functions to the items that they were familiar to make their inventions.
It's Valentines Day this Friday! Thanks to all the families for sharing wonderful treats and fruit with everyone at Creative Minds. As an inspiration for art activity , Anamaria read the book, "In My Heart" by Molly Bang, to the children. The story was about the special connections between parents and children.
Here, we used pipe-cleaners and coloured beads to make our Valentines craft. The children chose and threaded coloured beads; then, the teachers helped the children to shape the pipe-cleaners into heart shapes. It was really sweet to hear some children wanted to bring the heart-shaped decoration home for daddy and mommy.
Transdisciplinary Theme: Where we are in place and time
Central Idea: There are similarities and differences between the way people lived long ago and the way people live today. Lines of Inquiry:
There are similarities and differences between past and present.
inventions have been made that impact the things we do.
Changes in daily life.
This video was shown to the children as an inspiration of the art activity today. "What do you notice in this video? What colour do you see on those photos ?" I asked. "Black ,white and gray!" the children answered. As well, they noticed there were different kinds of gray colour in the pictures.
Here we started to explore how the black-and-white photos were different from the coloured photos we have nowadays. The children wondered why the photos had to be printed in a darkroom and why people wash the photos with, while we watched the video. "That was a lot of work to print a photo in the olden days!" both the children and teachers thought.
Ink Wash Painting, an East Asia type of brush painting, also uses black and different shades of gray to present a picture. Connecting with black-and-white photos, we simply used black paint and water to create shades from deep black to silvery gray. The children enjoyed creating pictures with only black, white and shades of gray.
After this art activity, the children became more aware of the change of colour using. In the afternoon some children noticed how there were books with colourful pictures and books with only black-and-white pictures.
Instead of individual artwork, we decided to create a big garden poster to keep in our classroom. The children were excited to do a multimedia collage, using flowers, leaves, straw and seeds. As well, there were sponge painting with spring colour! 
