Open Court in Plein Air

Today, after independent reading, we concluded our reading of Priscilla, Meet Felicity. I have to admit that I particularly like this story because it is NOT particularly sweet or sentimental. The two girls do not ever become friends, and, in fact, there is a clear message that there are just some people you cannot and should not be friends with. That is so much more realistic than the usual stories we make the children read. We discussed the Priscilla at length, analyzing the conflict and resolution and learning to make and support generalizations about the characters. After our discussion, we took two quizzes. One quiz was about the story, the other assessed their knowledge of multiple-meaning words. Check their scores on our gradebook.

We then continued developing our Visualizing and Making Connections strategies by bringing visual arts again into our program. Most of Priscilla takes place in a school, probably one not much different from ours, so it made sense to create a picture of a school at this point. I also decided to have the students do this out-of-doors, or, to usual the technical term, in "plein air".

We reviewed what we had already learned about lines and shapes, particularly the difference between geometric shapes and free-form shapes. We looked at several pictures of buildings and analyzed them for the different shapes we saw in each photograph or paining. I then took the children out to Demoudy Court, the area around the lunch tables. The children picked a part of the school building to draw. They tried to find the big geometric shapes first and draw those, adding the details later. As the first lunch students started to arrive, we went back to our classroom where they went over the lines in marking crayon and then watercolored the pictures. The results, as you can see above, were quite good!

Homework: Study for tomorrow's spelling test. Finish the page explaining what Stevie and Priscilla helped develop the idea of friendship. Do the worksheet on comparisons: it will be either "Compare and Contrast" OR "A Friendly Comparison". Students should be finishing the section on addition (Number Sense 2.1) tonight, if they are not already finished with it.