Twenty Five-Twenty Seven

The kids have been kind of wild this week and I just haven't had the blogging spirit...but here's what we've done in class Monday-Wednesday...

I've been discussing foreground, middleground and background with second graders and we've talked about how objects in the foreground appear bigger whereas objects in the background are smaller. We started these butterfly paintings on a day when we had a fire drill a week or so ago and had just gotten done talking about how the butterflies in the background were supposed to be drawn small because they were either flying away from us or just getting closer to us...when the fire alarm went off we went outside and they were in such a great, quiet line (we're not allowed to talk in line outside during a fire drill)---then we saw the yellow butterflies and they got SO excited! I heard one student whisper something like, "look that butterfly is looking so small to me now because he's flying away..." Awesome.

This is one picture of the foreground/background project and then a few pics of a large crayon crackle butterfly painting we did after a discussion on symmetry. We pointed out things in the room that are symmetrical and things that are not, then they had to do a symmetrical butterfly that took up the entire paper. (They are so terrified of drawing BIG.)


Speaking of awesome, a co-worker/friend of mine and her daughter were walking in with me a few mornings ago to sign in at the office and she said, "You will be so proud of Becca, you just won't believe our discussion on the way to school this morning...we were talking about the sunrise and how pretty it was...Becca asked me if I ever noticed that sunrises usually have the warm colors in them and sunsets usually have more cool colors." Love it!