This week, students have been learning about combining nouns in order to make compound subjects.  In order to increase student understanding, we prepared an Arts Integration lesson involving the showing of emotions.  Students were told that the way a character shows emotion lets the audience know what that character is thinking.  To begin this lesson, we read The Way I Feel by Janan Cain.  Throughout the book, the main character is experiencing almost every kind of emotion (happy, sad, angry, frustrated, proud, thankful, etc.), but later tells readers that his emotions are what makes him unique.  After reading the book, students were paired up and given an emotion card.  With the emotion card, they also received a predicate of a sentence to practice reading using that emotion.  Students then filled in their names as the subjects to make two simple sentences.  Once they read their name and the predicate using their assigned emotion, they were to combine both subjects and the predicate to create a compound sentence.  This lesson also taught students the roles of performers and audiences.  After students were finished performing, the audience had to guess which emotion they were portraying.

While learning about narrative elements (Characters, Setting, Plot, Theme, Moral, etc), the students completed an arts integration lesson involving the techniques of famous artist, Henri Rousseau. Rousseau painted scenes that clearly show the use of background, middleground, and foreground. The students learned how the artist would have to complete the background first, the middleground second, and the foreground would be the final step in the creative process. Students applied this concept to narrative elements. First you must know the characters and setting when reading the story. They are the background. Next, you learn the plot, the conflict, and resolution. This is the middleground of the story. Finally, once you have read the entire story, you can determine the theme and moral. This is like the foreground of the story. These elements only come to light in the final stages.

So the students read a fable in a group, completed a chart stating the narrative elements from the fable, and then used a variety of art materials including watercolor and construction paper to creatively show the narrative elements in the background, middleground, and foreground of their artwork.

Over the past week, we have been reading our class novel, My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Gannett. The book is about a boy who travels to a mysterious make believe island in order to save a dragon in hopes of using him as a personal aircraft. Throughout the book, the boy runs into animals that threaten to harm him, but luckily, he’s packed odd items in his knapsack that he uses to get himself out of these dangerous situations with the animals.  After reading the novel, the students used cutting and folding techniques to create their very own dragon using a toilet paper roll. The students then worked in groups to make a sequel for the class novel. The twist was that they had to use their dragon that they made in class and travel our hallway which is a mural of the famous Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson. Walter Anderson is known for painting animals in their native habitats. The students found a painted scene in the mural for inspiration of the characters and setting of the story, picked an item form the knapsack that was used in solving a problem the dragon encounters, and developed a plot for the chapter their group was responsible for writing. The end product was a five chapter sequel creativity written by the whole class that was inspired by the novel, My Father’s Dragon, and the famous Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson, that we had been studying.

Here is one of our sequels below.

Once upon a time, there was this dragon named Bubbles. He went to Walter Anderson’s World. He first went to visit Butterflyland to get seven boogleberries for Elmer because he as sick. But he ran into seven angry butterflies, and then they started to attack him. He threw glitter on their wings. They stop attacking him because they thought there wings were beautiful.

Later that day Bubbles landed on a rock and saw an Indian. Then the Indian tried to shoot him with the bow and arrow, so he reached in his knapsack and got a skeleton. They ran away. Bubbles kept traveling and ran into rhinos.  Then Bubbles asked the rhino, “What do you know about this world?” Then the Rhino said, “I don’t know because I’m new to this world. I saw you scare the Indians with the skeleton.”   So Bubbles continued his journey.

Bubbles walked on and on until he walked into a beautiful spot called Alligator Swamp. “I am hungry for a juicy green watermelon,” said the alligator named Alliot. So then Bubbles kept walking into the swamp and he saw the alligator and the alligator saw him too!  “Why are you in my Swamp?”, said Alliot.   “I didn’t know it was your swamp.”, said Bubbles. “Now I don’t want a watermelon. Now I want YOU!”, said Alliot. “No, don’t eat me. I have something for you hunger,” he said whining.  Bubble reached into his knapsack and for some headphones. “What are those?”, said Alligator. “Something that gives you tasty food.” said Bubbles.  So he gave the headphones to Alliot and he didn’t hear Bubbles walk off.

After  that Bubbles came across an owl in a tree and Bubbles said, “Hello, Mr. Owl. What’s wrong?”  “I am afraid of heights, but I don’t know how tall my tree is.”, said Mr. Owl. Then Bubbles reached in his knapsack and got a tape measurer. “What are you going to do with that?”, asked Mr. Owl. “I am going to measure your tree for you.”, said Bubbles. Bubbles flew up and measured the tree for Mr. Owl. “Your tree is 4,000 feet talk!”, screamed Bubbles. “Thank you! Thank you!”, said Mr. Owl. Just then three fancy owls came and said, “Mr. Owl, you win the Tallest Tree Award.  Thank you, Bubbles!”

The next day they flew to Deerland and ran into two deer. The deer was weeping about their antlers being dirty. Then Bubbles said, “I know what you can use to clean your antlers.”  The deer said, “What?” “You can you soap. All you have to do is squirt the soap on your antlers and scrub it.”, explained Bubbles. Then the antlers became very white. The deer were happy and told Bubbles thank you. Bubbles almost forgot about Elmer until he ran into ta tree full of boogleberries! He took some and he flew all the way home to help Elmer.

The beginning of the 2016-2017 school year is almost here!! AAHH!! 🙂

We are getting excited about all of our new fourth graders coming in. If you haven’t seen the school supply lists, they are up on the district website (see link below). We will need all of these supplies beginning on the first day – Thursday, August 4th – so make sure you have them ready, please!

http://www.laurelschools.org/sites/laurelschools.org/files/nora_davis_magnet_2016-17.pdf

This past Monday we held our annual 4th grade Famous Artist Living Wax Museum.  This unit is a culmination of a month long unit where the teacher steps back and facilitates the students as they delve into the world and minds of famous artists from both past and present. The students worked in groups to complete the following for their wax museum presentation:

• Researched the artist using the internet, encyclopedias, and various informational texts.
• Wrote a biography and a reflection about the author and his or her work.
• Created a timeline illustrating important events in the author’s life.
• Critiqued one of the artist’s paintings using the art criticism method of describing, interpreting, analyzing, and evaluating.
• Wrote a first person point of view script based on important events and the significance of the artist.
• Created a visual background to host the above materials.
• Recreated one of the artist’s pieces of work individually.
• Recreated one of the artist’s pieces of work as a group where all opinions were considered.

See each group and their artist represented in the pictures above.

We are in our fourth week of our artist unit! We have finished our novel, written biographies, reflections, and now we are starting to create our artwork and write our scripts. We still have about one week left, but we decided to give you a sneak peek! Come see us COME TO LIFE on Monday, May 2nd at 1:00! It’s a come and go affair!

 CLICK HERE to watch!

The students have been reading a crime investigation mystery novel the past few weeks called Chasing Vermeer.  The novel has been very exciting, and we can’t wait to figure out “who did it?” While we are waiting though, we had the fortunate opportunity for one of our district resource officers, Officer Kevin Flynn, to come by and teach us about fingerprints and investigations. Officer Flynn has extensive knowledge about being a detective and compiling evidence for an investigation. Officer Flynn talked to the students about how to spot different points on fingerprints, the different types of fingerprints, what fingerprints are made of, and he even showed the students how to dust for fingerprints and lift fingerprints off of objects using a fingerprint lifting chamber. The students found it all very exciting, and they can’t wait to do some more investigating!

Students demonstrated their knowledge of the science terms: transparent, translucent, and opaque by creating a replica of O’Keefee’s flowers by using different materials. They wrote reflections that explained these terms that were found in their artwork. Georgia O’Keefee is one of the artist that our grade is studying during our four week artist unit.

The students learned about famous artist Alexander Calder. Calder is famous for creating artistic mobiles that hang from ceilings, but also for creating stabiles which are stationary mobiles.  Calder explained the difference between stabiles and mobiles this way: “You have to walk around a stabile or through it – a mobile dances in front of you.” The students worked in a group to create a stabile to show the eight moon phases that they had been studying in class. The students used aluminum foil on black circles to show the different amounts of light that is reflected from the Sun, creating the moon phases. The students used cups for the stationary aspect of the mobile and pipe cleaners to create some movement within the piece. Pictures do not do these sculptures justice, come by and see them in person!

We are on a two week unit about space while reading our class novel My Teacher is an Alien! We’ve learned about the International Space Station and how our solar system works and all of its parts that makes it so special. On Friday, we read a descriptive short story about aliens with our partner. After highlighting the description in the passages,  we created art that was based from the passage. This week we are continuing our study about space!