Thank you to Sherry, Ensley’s grandmother, for leading the class through the Mother’s Day experience. Sherry has been working with the Sierra Watercolor Society and was able to demonstrate some watercolor techniques to the students.
Thank you to all the families who helped with the 2023 holiday celebration.
We continue to make huge academic strides and cover a lot of content. We completed our work with place value and have started a unit on multi-digit multiplication. We continued our study of the Earth and Sun with activities in and out of the classroom. We moved a Which One Doesn’t Belong to the four square area and thanks to our art volunteers, finished a lesson that integrated our language standards.
The focus on routines and procedures, the first two weeks of the school year, paid off. Week three was about content. We started science and a focus on the Earth and the Sun. Using Microsoft Teams and the ability to upload our social studies textbook to the platform, we read about indigenous groups of North and South America. We added and subtracted decimals and continued to expand sentences, this time using subordinating conjunctions. We read about Antartica and water, from our adopted ELA materials, and we completed our first art project. Great week.
A post describing an art lesson shouldn’t be that interesting. Instead, it is. This is because it was the first time, all year, that I have had an opportunity to teach in person to my distance learning students. It was great to see them and their final pieces turned out great.
For this lesson, students selected a building they have visited or wanted to visit one day. To do this, they used Google Maps and the Street View. After drawing their building and adding details, they mixed colors to create a mood in the background. This was followed by selecting and applying analogous and complimentary colors for their building.
We completed our Enchanted Lands project this week and the final pieces are terrific. We first explored the idea of background, midground, and foreground through classic pieces of art. Then we played a game in which students drew images matched to magical elements, they identified.
Their understanding was then leveraged to create art that included painting a setting and collaging. (Incidentally, thanks for all of the magazines!)
The class was quite fortunate in being selected for a visit by the Sierra Watercolor Society. This is a group that helps students understand watercolor technique and color theory before having the students compose their own watercolor piece. This was a nice experience and it was great that our classroom got to participate.
Students finished their Enchanted Lands following several days making careful observation of art by Albert Bierstadt, Erik Johansson, and Salvador Dali; learning about foreground, mid-ground, and background; studying setting and magical elements; and how to use paint and collage to build out their piece of art.
One of the great things about Roy Gomm is the consistent exposure to the arts that students receive. In part, the Masterpiece Art program, led by parent volunteers, aids this. This week parents led students through an exploration of work by Wassily Kandinsky.
The finished art will be displayed in the Gomm multipurpose room.
Room 360 