Flamenco Art Smarts

During the month of October we spent some time studying Flamenco. We began our unit by reading the fiction story Lola's Fandango by Anna Witte, a story about a young girl that learns to dance Flamenco from her father.

This wonderful book got us curious to learn more about Flamenco so we read a non-fiction book called Ole! Flamenco by George Ancona. This book taught us so much about Flamenco! We learned that Flamenco was started by the Gypsies of Spain in the 1750s and that there are actually 3 elements of Flamenco: the dance, the song and the guitar.

After learning about Flamenco we watched some Flamenco dancing, listened to some amazing Flamenco guitar music.

Here we are working in groups to draw pictures of what we visualize when we listen to some Flamenco songs. Many of Flamenco songs were about the hardships of the Gypsies.

 

Finally it was time to try out our Flamenco dance moves. With the help of a few youtube "how to flamenco dance" tutorial videos we were able to Flamenco dance with just feet and then arm movements. We reflected on how it was to Flamenco dance. All of us had fun but agreed that it was difficult too!

Here is our final project. It was ready just in time for Hispanic Heritage Night!

Fall Fun Day!

On Wednesday we celebrated Fall with Fall Fun Day!

In the morning we worked on writing an informational paragraph using our fall animal research done during Daily 5 center time.  The students did a great job taking their notes and turning them into complete sentences and adding topic and concluding sentences. Check out our paragraphs in the hallway!

To compliment our research paragraphs we did some fall fun animal centers in the afternoon.
There was Animal Measurement (Thank you Ms. Foote for letting us borrow your animals for the day!):

Making Bat Clips to display our research in hallway:

Making Owls:

More animal research and reading Halloween books:

Making a yummy Fall Fun Mix and doing a little math to add up the number of ingredients in our mix:

We certainly had a FUN time!

 

Class Garden

Thank you to Hazel's mom and George's mom for getting our class garden ready! The kids loved planting all the vegetables and herbs and can't wait to see our garden grow!

Classroom Map Project

Recently in Research we have been studying all about maps. We have learned about the parts of maps, how to read them and how to use them for different reasons.

Here we are reading about and investigating maps:

To end our Research unit on Maps the students were challenged to create a map of our classroom. We used the "Super 3: Plan, Do, Review" to complete the project. The "Super 3" helps us organize, plan and review work so that we are doing our best work.
Students first had to plan out how they were going to complete the project and list all the resources and materials they would need.  Once that was done, they could start creating their classroom maps.

Here we are working hard on our maps:

After finishing our maps, we had to complete the "Review" step to make sure we did our best work.

Check out our completed maps!