Flat George Teaches

Getting up early is not my thing. I can be grouchy, but Gramma gave me some duties so it wasn't boring coming to school and I cheered up. Here I am making copies. Gramma doesn't make too many copies because her students use Google Apps and blogs. Today, though, they needed some extra directions.



Speaking of directions, I got to show the kids the agenda for the day. Gramma says that as soon as the kids walk in the room they ask, "What are we gonna do today?" So she puts up an agenda, and they settle in. Here's the agenda for three classes:

At lunch time, Gramma had to make phone calls. By the way, at school I am supposed to say, "Ms Edwards." That's what the kids call her. Guess what? She dropped her keys behind the phone desk, which is on wheels, but is still hard to move. So, lucky I'm so flat, I can crawl five miles in a 0.5 inch space. I had four inches here so it was a snap. I even found "Honey's" nerf basketball. Honey is the middle name of one of Gramma's students. Isn't that sweet?

What I am very proud of is the picture I drew following Gramma's art directions.  Gramma thinks kids need art, and there is no art class at this school. So today's assignment was to learn about creating depth in art by reading and looking at images and art that teaches students how to draw foreground, middle ground, and background.  You can read the directions in that link.  After drawing a picture using the strategy, students wrote the directions for how to do it. Since they needed to draw pictures, the students wrote on paper, then we took pictures of the writing, sketches, and drawings and put those on the blog. Here is one that is finished. This class went to camp this week so their blogs aren't finished yet.

You might want to read about their ZITS projects. Did you know zits are not caused by foods? You can learn a lot more on their blogs. They were learning how to choose the main idea and details. The hard part was pulling out a "story" from the nonfiction article. Some of the students were able to change the facts into stories.  All of them needed to use text features (titles, color, fonts, bold, subtitles, images, glossaries, etc.) and text organization (title, introduction, body, conclusion, images, citations). What do you think? You could make a comment on the one you like. Next time, the students will read an article of their own and draw out the story in the nonfiction articles to create their own articles.

Do you blog in your classroom? Could you make a drawing with depth?