Tear-Jerker

For Christmas, I choreographed a dance routine and put together a movie for my students' performance. They performed to the song, Grown-up Christmas List, by Amy Grant in front of the entire school. Fellow staff, parents, and even children were in tears when the performance was over. The words of the song are moving, and on the movie, the students had written out their "grown-up" wishes to Santa for Christmas. If you understand the background of my students, you would know why their wishes pierce the heart. I will try to put a live clip of that up here when I get a chance.

These pictures were taken on the last day of school. As a surprise for the kids, I played the performance clip from Christmas time, which most of them had not seen yet. My desk was behind them, so it was cute to secretly watch them from behind, and see some of them slowly get up one at a time as they watched, and start doing the motions all over again. They were so proud of that day, as I was of them. The second picture is when they realized I was watching and taking pictures.

Fun with 4th Graders

As some of you know, my school did not have full time staff for any of the non-core subjects. So, it was up to me to come up with some kind of curriculum for my students in art, music, PE, computers, etc. I was at first overwhelmed at the idea, but gradually came to embrace it since I got a chance to teach students the things I enjoyed as well. Who knew I'd have my own mini-volleyball teams one day? ...or my own mini-choir/dramatics/dance team? I definitely went to town with those!

Here are a couple art projects we did. The first, Scribblimagination, came from a game I played with my friend, Matt, at Tampa Urban Project in Florida. The game was simple. You draw any old scribble, hand it over to your friend, and they create something from that scribble. This may sound dull to some, but I thought it was so entertaining! I loved doing this with my students since kids have the craziest imaginations!

This was one of my favorite, by Felicia. It looks like a fish is jumping out of the water to devour a dog (The green is the original scribble). Awesome.

Another project I came up with started from a drawing assignment I had in my drawing class at Rochester Adams High School with Mr. Brooks. He was one scary teacher, and most students didn't like him.  Even still, he always believed in me and my abilities. Thanks Mr. Brooks! I will try to do something with what I have!

So, in his class, we had to draw and then finish a picture completely out of dots. I made a picture of Kramer from Seinfeld and gave it to my close friend as a gift. That was the only project I ever finished for that class. I'm proud of the picture and will scan it in once I find it.

I ended up assigning the same project to my 4th graders and they blew me away. I went into the project hesitant since I had done this as a high school upperclassman, but I figured 4th graders could make dots. Since Seurat had also made pictures out of dots, I made an extra lesson out of it, and we learned about the color-infused paintings of Seurat as inspiration for the start of the project.

Here's some of the best work from the kids.