January brings the snow....

Thank you to Kathy Barbro for this wonderful tryptic art project for snowmen!

What I really loved was how far the students have come in listening, and remembering so that they can follow multistep directions.  It is such an important skill to develop!

Step One:  They had to choose 3 smaller card stock rectangles to paste onto the larger navy card stock rectangle.  they are learning how to please their eye in colour choice as well as how to place papers to create 'frames' evenly around their smaller papers.

When they added the small pieces of white paper to the bottom of the coloured card stock, they ripped the tops of the papers to create a more natural edge that represented a snow base.

Nine small circles were cut and then pasted one on top of the other....

...to create snowmen.

Each snowman came alive with the details added with sharpie pen, and some of the students also added a little black paper top hat for the snowman to interact with.

By the by, many of the students never did have a sharpie pen and the half dozen or so that I had are nearly empty.  Maybe you could pick one up to send to school the next time you are out and about ?

The different coloured backgrounds really change the appearance of the work.  Did you notice that it is snowing in each frame?

Today the students were introduced to the 'H' brothers.  I have been meaning to make these guys for a while now and finally did this week. The four 'brothers'  are all representing a different digraph.

Diagraphs are “voiceless” combinations of two consonants.  

Following are examples:     st, sh, ch, th, wh  

Here's Shane who makes the sound /sh/.

Charlie loves trains and the sound /ch/.

Wheeler takes his whistle everywhere and makes the /wh/ sound.

Theo needs to use his tongue to make the sound /th/.

You may notice that your child is looking for these 4 brothers as they are reading at night.  It's part of our challenge.  More work to come with these guys.

I love this project and how it turned out.  The students got dressed in all of their snow gear and thought of their favourite thing to do in the winter.  They then demonstrated what their body does as they are involved in that activity and I snapped a picture.  After they were printed, I cut them out.  The students wrote about their activity using some of the following criteria:

• must be a minimum of 5 sentences
• told in first person so the words 'I' and 'my' will be used
• find five nouns and include an adjective to describe that noun
• check that all sentences begin and end properly
• check for spelling errors
• after editing with the teacher, print legibly on the good copy, leaving lines

The students were able to choose a background to paste their photo onto and then added brown paper strips with some marker details so that they looked like the pictures were framed.

So many of their hallway buddies have been stopping and 'ohhhh' and 'ahhhh'ing because they are taking pride of place on the bulletin board outside of our classroom.