Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts

Sunday, 26 July 2015

SmArts 2014-15 Part 3



Chalk Pastels

Our final classes introduced students to the delightful realness and the great results of working with Chalk Pastels.   

 

Elephants and Dragon Flies

The younger student's chalk pastel project were a dragonfly and a baby elephant playing with a big ball.  
 






 


 The older class project was a large African scene featuring both an authentic adult African elephant and tree.  The pastel chalk medium lent itself to creating very believable skin for the elephants bringing them to life on both projects.  











Self Portraits

Janelle - Grade 1

After our first exposure to working with chalk pastels we moved on to pastel self portraits.   In hindsight this was a very advanced level project requiring many hours of one on one, hands on assistance, and in the end some fine tuning via the instructor with the student present.  

Daniel - Grade 1
The sum total of all efforts of students, Brennan School teachers and EA's were certainly worth it.  Our instructor, Carol Barbeau, felt that the basic lesson of bringing to life each student's image registered with each of the children at their individual level of learning.   

Joel - Grade 4




The lesson taught how very important details are. Students learned to seriously think about their own eye color and other details of their eyes, and the unique, individual shape of lips, head, ears, hair, the special shape and hair of eyebrows, skin tone, plus the simple few strokes that create their nose.
Nicole - Grade 6


Once completed, we framed the self portraits and the students presented them to their dads as Father's Day gifts.
























Thanks Carol for volunteering your time to spend several one-on-one classes with our students to see the projects to completion.  Also, I appreciate your input in this blog post!








Saturday, 27 December 2014

Natural Resources and Animal Needs

Well, report cards are done; the Christmas concert has been performed and we're in the midst of Christmas holidays now, so here's my next blog post going back a month or two with the content...

Natural Resources

As part of my unit on Our Local Community we also did some work on our natural resources.  As an introduction to this topic, we watched the following video: Natural Resources.  My friend Kathy Stahl and I found a neat  idea  "Eric Carle" book idea for this specific project in this Landforms book.    A different colour of construction paper was selected for each of the natural resources: yellow - sun, light blue - air, grey - animals, green - plants, brown, minerals, black soil and dark blue - water.  We simply changed the topic to natural resources.  Since I have a younger group of students (mostly grade 1) I created  a cloze captions for each of the natural resources.  The students filled in however we use each natural resource and illustrated them.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Needs of Living Things

 To connect our science unit of Growth and Changes in Animals to Our Local Community, the students each selected  either a wild of domestic animal from our area and created a flip book describing how it meets its needs. The idea came from this link on Basic Needs.  A song is used to introduce the topic.