Not the best day

I usually try to be pretty upbeat in this blog, but I have to admit, I was not the best day. I have been a teacher at Third Street since 1998. In that entire time, I have never had anything stolen from me. Today I discovered that someone had stolen my camera – mine, not the school’s. I am not accusing anyone from our class; I am pretty confident it was not one of our students. But it is still pretty disappointing to know that there are children or adults like that. I know that something similar has also happened to a couple of students in the room too, and I know their parents are as unhappy about it as I am.

Despite this, we had a reasonably productive day. After the usual morning activities, we did some integrating of art and writing. I had the students do that classic art school exercise called “blind contour drawing.” This is when the artist tries to draw something without looking at the paper or lifting the pencil. The results are always awful, but the concentration on the object is what matters. I handed out a box of crayons to each student and had them do a blind contour drawing of it. The students had fun with this assignment; it was the first time when having something that looked bad meant that you’d done a good job!

After that we looked inside the crayon box and the students allowed the colors to generate similes. We wrote these in free verse couplets like this:

Pink like

        strawberry ice cream dripping down a cone.

The students then had the opportunity to do a real drawing (when they could look at the paper) of their crayon box and to color it. They will be finishing both of these assignments for homework as needed.

Homework:  (1) Finish the simile poem about the colors in your crayon box. Be sure to use at least 8 colors. For each one write a comparison with “like" or “as”. Write it in cursive split into couplets as discussed above. (2) Finish drawing and coloring the crayon box. (3) Do review questions over “My Brother Martin” in preparation for the quiz tomorrow. (4) Do “Multiplication,” pages 101-102 in the math book. (5) Do the expanded form worksheet. There will be a quiz over this tomorrow, too.