A Week of Art 2011

Arts Week- Day 1

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

 This past Monday through Thursday was Arts Week. Jo Fenney who is the teacher in the other year 4 class headed up this week of art activities, but she let me plan what I did with my group of 17 students. I got to lead the GNT's (gifted and talented) artists for the week which consisted of kids from years, 3, 4, 5, 6. One of the special things that they got to do was go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park outside of Wakefield. Apparently this was one of Europe's leading open-air galleries, but this would have been much more evident without the extreme wind gusts and sideways rain... None the less, the kids did amazing with not complaining after I made a challenge for them to not say anything about how cold it was. We spent time walking through the park and sitting and sketching some of the sculptures. I noticed a them of rabbits in the sculptures, which I thought was a little odd. We didn't have a strict schedule we just wandered around drawing things and it was really successful that way.
Helen (Miss Leyland) drove the mini-bus this day to our place in the wind and she did really good and it was fun to be with her. I haven't spent much time with her during school time and she was BRILL!

Callum (a future photographer) took this picture through one of the sculptures!

So sun came out for Tasneem

All of the GNTers: Turki, Anees, Zeeshan, Remesha, Hafsah, Tahleel, Callum, Nafisa, Manihel,  Ayesha, Aliyah, Tasneem, Shumrez, Hamza,  and Umira

 Day 2 & 3

*graphite sketches of leaves with different shading techniques

* watercolor paintings of animal in natural habitat

* leaf printmaking

* white conte crayons on black paper

* gold scratch art of flowers

*group project of acrylic on canvases (Nature)

* paper mosaic trees

* poem about nature on leaf

* weaving string through copper wire

*leaf outlines oil pastels rubbings

 Our main focus in this group was making a portfolio of many different art techniques all used to depict nature. We started off doing detailed graphite sketches of leaves that we collected. They then lined up the sketches with an acetate sheet and went over the outline with permanent markers and finished up by shading the acetate sheet with either cross hatches, pointillism or contour lines.
Our next project was doing scratch art of flowers. So they used scrapers to scrape off a black covering to reveal a gold color. This required a bit of skill and precision and I soon realized that these gifted kids that we older were much better at this than the normal enrichments that I teach! We then took leaves and laid them down on the paper and used oil pastels to go around the edges and smudge to create the outline of leaves. It was a fun filler project while others were finishing other things. Next we did our big collaborative project where we painted an abstract acrylic painting to show nature. This group project was a challenge, especially knowing when to stop...

We used the already messy room to do our leaf prints on fancy paper, which was really similar to printmaking.
Day 3 started out doing watercolor paintings of an animal in their nature habitat. I was really impressed with the creativity that they used to come up with their animal. After their paintings they moved on to making paper mosaic trees. They ripped paper into to small pieces and re-glued it down to make a tree.
We did a reverse shading technique and put white and gray conte crayons on black paper. The kids had to think in reverse and that was a challenge, but I thought they did a brilliant job.
I also had the kids write a poem of their choice to write within a leaf to also put in their books. The hardest thing that I had the kids do was probably the weaving, although many of the kids LOVED doing this. The each had a square of copper wire and many different kinds of fibers and stings to weave in it. Some really grasped onto this and really surprised me; others struggled...

One of the watercolor paintings: a polar bear 

Day 4:

Assembled our portfolios

We put all of the activities that we did into a portfolio and the kids got to decorate the covers. On Thursday, we had representatives from the group show the rest of the school in an assembly what we did during the week.

Abby found a smile somewhere...or a grimace

I really enjoyed this week. It was hard and very tiring, but rewarded in the end. These kids don't have a regular art class, so art week is different than normal days. All day of every day is filled with art! Kind of like my university years... The week was a little unstructured, but it was nice to be able to go with the flow with this mixture of ages of kids. Well worth the time!

Absolutely exhausted after art week. Everyone was so pooped! Laying on a table
sounded like the best option at the time...

Our Flat Stanley Assembly

Last week was a really busy week for me. My class was required to do an assembly and Miss Mitchell thought is would be really great to do our assembly on the "Flat Stanley" project that I've been heading up. This brought a lot of responsibility and planning, but it was very rewarding to see what the kids were capable of. We ended up doing our assembly for years 3,4, and 5. The kids did really good for only going through it once the whole way through before performing it. I thought is was BRILLIANT!!! I've included the script that the kids used because in the video it is hard to understand exactly what the kids are saying...
" Our Flat Stanley project is a world-wide activity based on the book by Jeff Brown. In this book, Stanley is flattened by his bulletin board that hung over his bed. This resulted in him being able to have amazing adventures because he was able to be mailed through the post! 

We have made our own flattened version of ourselves and we posted them all over the world to five different continents! The people that Miss Unruh knows took our flat people around and have sent them back with stories of the adventures we went on.

Six of us went to each country.  We went to the bottom of Africa to the country of South Africa. There we visited Kristen who is 21 and is going to school for photography. 

While we were there, Kristen took us on a safari where we got to see lots of animals. We saw lions, rhinoceroses, zebras, and giraffes. 

"Drive" around with the jeep.

Can you spot all the giraffes? There should be 6 of them around the hall…

Point to the giraffes around the hall

Some other interesting facts we learned about South Africa while we were there:

There are 45 million people living in South Africa

The currency is the South African Rand

There are 11 official languages there

There are more than 2000 shipwrecks off the coasts

South Africa produces the most gold in the world

While in China, We visited Nate. He helped us learn how to count in ten in Chinese. Do you want learn how too? ***pause***  Ok, well repeat after us…

someone do the flashcards...

While we were in China we realized that there were a lot of people there and many  of the buildings were really tall so that they could hold more people. We made some good friends there. 

We learned thatThe Great Wall of China was started over two and a half thousand years ago and is more than 5,000 km long.

*One-fifth of the world's population lives in China.

*Chinese people live in modern buildings in the towns, farmhouses in rural areas. So live in houses made of bamboo and even caves in the 

mountains and houseboats on the rivers and in harbours.

*Bamboo is a very fast growing plant which can grow up to one metre a day. Its eaten by Pandas.

* It was the first to invent gunpowder which was used for fireworks.

*Crops include rice, wheat, maize, soya beans, sesame, sugar, along with %20 of the world's supply in tea. 

In Germany we stayed with Melita. She thought that it was important to be able to speak a little German. 

“Guten Tag! Wie Gehts?”

***translator*** (Hello! How are you?)

“Sehr gut, danke.”

***translator*** (Very good, thank you.)

“Wie heisst du?”

***translator*** (What’s your name?)

“Ich heisse ___________, und du?”

***translator***(My name is _________, and yours?”

“Ich heisse _______________.

***translator*** (My name is ___________.)

In Germany, which is also called Deutchland we ate a ton of chocolate! Melita sent enough that all of you get to try some after our assembly!

We crossed into the Southern Hemisphere to go to New Zealand to visit Karla. Karla teaches Spanish to kids in New Zealand.  People who where born in New Zealand are called Kiwis, like the fruit. 

Some of us are now going to perform the Haka. The Haka is the traditional war dance of the Maori people who are native to New Zealand.

Years ago when two tribes would fight each other, both would do the haka to intimidate the other tribe. Nowadays, the haka is just performed by men to show Maori culture.

Those of you who think we look silly---Remember, the New Zealand All Blacks, the rugby team do it before each game and they’ve held the top ranking in the world for longer than all other countries combined!

Perform Haka!!!

Some things that we learned about New Zealand while we were visiting were:

• • New Zealand was the first country to let men AND women vote

• • There are 9 sheep for every human that live there

• • Sir Edmund Hillary, who was from New Zealand was the first person to reach       the peak of Mount Everest and now has his face on the 5 dollar bill.
• • Bungee jumping was invented in New Zealand
• • New Zealand is the home of the largest flightless parrot, the oldest reptile,   the biggest earthworms, the smallest bats, the heaviest insects, some of the oldest trees, and many rare species of animals.

The last place that we went to was to Florida in America. There we visited Miss Finnegan’s mom, Jane. She is a teacher there and students in most schools are required to say the pledge of allegiance EVERY morning at the start of school…

(someone stands up on something holding a flag and another student recites the pledge of allegiance.)

“I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America and to the republic for which is stands, once nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

We saw a lot of flags in America. Did you know that there are 50 stars on the American flag that represent that there are 50 states.  There are also 13 stripes on the flag that represent the original 13 colonies. 

We also noticed that the Americans were speaking English but they sounded really funny. A lot of the words that we used we didn't understand. We made a list and here are a few:

We say----trainers 

They say----sneakers

We say---football

They say---soccer

We say-----shopping center

They say----mall

We say---chips

They say---french fries

We say---crisps

They say----chips

We say ---rubbish

They say---trash

We say---rubber

They say---eraser

We looked out for movie stars, but unfortunately didn't see any.  We did have an "awesome" time at Disney World in Orlando.

We learned a lot as we were jet setting around the world. We hope that you have learned a little about other countries too! Don't forget your chocolate. Kids, your teachers have yours!

I'm really so proud of all of my kids. They were so cute and did absolutely amazing. I loved the effort they put into the haka and all of their lines. The Germany skip was ACE, and they really made me smile. It was really neat to be able to share something like traveling and learning new cultures with these kids. It was well worth all of the extra time and effort!

Whitby with Year 5 Class Trip

This last Friday I got to go on a class trip to Whitby, which is on the east coast. This trip was with year 5, which is where Leigh has been all year. It was really neat to go with all of the kids that Leigh has been talking about so much. Funny enough, I basically knew the names to the kids by all of the stories and descriptions that I've heard. It was easy to remember them too! I had a great day, even though the weather was on and off spitting mist/rain.

The bus ride there and back was a little of a challenge. Apparently we had ordered a coach (with actual seats) but we ended up getting a service bus, like the ones that go around the city with bench seating. And....it was from the 80's...which made the seats uncomfortable and the bus ride there was 2 1/2 hours. The way back was worse. Our bus was so old that it couldn't make it up one of the big hills of Whitby that we had to make a detour to avoid the hill. Then we had to stop to get petrol even though the bus driver had 4 hours without us to fill up...AND the bus driver decided he needed a coffee. Add traffic on a Friday during the late afternoon to the equation and the bus ride back took 4 hours!

While we were there we had a good time though. We got to take a boat ride on Captain Cook's boat (who "discovered" New Zealand) out of the harbour and along the coastline for a bit. Even though is was quite chilly and sporadically sprinkling, the kids were still up for going to a "paddle" in the sea. They were told not to get wet, but yeah.....they got completely soaked. Yet, none complained about how cold they were. I think that part of the day was my favorite because I know that a lot of the kids don't get to see the sea very often or ever. 

Off in the distance is the boat that we got to ride on. The other half of year 5 were enjoying their ride.

After the kids got completely drenched we walked around the town for a while. We didn't have time to climb the millions of stairs up to the Abbey, but we did have time for the kids to waste their money buying anything that was in their price range. They were very concerned when they were going to get the opportunity to spend their parents money on crap. I don't think anything kid had any money left by the end of the 15 minute shopping spree. Not a cent! I bought a Whitby "lucky duck" that was clear glass because my birthstone is a diamond. Someone had told me that was what I should look for because they are a bit famous and I thought is was a cute idea. I also bought some "rock" that was different flavours. "Rock" is a hard candy that you can get on the coasts towns of England. Linda had brought some back for the class, so I had tried it, but I bought some to take home for people to try. It was a lovely day...

The kids LOVED running in the waves. It was fun to see the JOY! :)

A walk in the woods...

Bluebells....although they are a bit purple!

In the woods next to Angie's house. I thought that we had missed them while in Ireland, but they were still alive when we got back luckily!

A Royal Time at the Royal Wedding, April 29, 2011

Our day started like any other...except it started at 4:30 in the morning. We were up by 4:30, left the Mennonite Center by 5:15, and on the tube by 5:30 on its first run into the city. We were not happy, but we knew it was necessary if we wanted to see anything. We got off at the Charing Cross Tube Station and started our search for the best place to set up camp. We didn't have intentions of ended up at "The Mall", but we started walking and that is where we ended up. It was completely lined with people that had spent the night there, so we found some tents that were taking up a lot of space ad camped behind them. Our theory was that when they picked up their tents and condensed we would be 2nd row, maybe even first! Our theory worked. We had a really nice spot and set up our blanket and ate our sugar breakfast while passing the time. 

Policed were everywhere. They knew that there could be crazies out there and they were going to take full precautions. To the right is what the mall looked like a little before 6 in the morning. Obviously, the route was closed to traffic, but they did send street cleaners down at least 20 times in the morning. And, like most saw of t.v., Union Jack flags lines the whole route too. These were absolutely massive!

 As the time went on we got more and more excited for something to happen. The people behind us also were getting excited and were starting to really pressure us to stand up. We were getting closed in. We were trying to keep our blanket down and stay seating for as long as possible because we knew it would be a while until we sat back down again once we started. June was feeling the pressure and had lots of flags in her face from the kids around us...

Harry (and William) on the way to Westminster.

Speaking of the kids...I had such mixed feeling on this issue. There were heaps of kids trying to stand in front of us. All encouraged by their parents of course. (I secretly thought that is how they were also moving to the front) I had mixed feeling because many of these kids were so rude. I had a little boy pushing me and standing on my feet the entire time. I guess when you wake up so early and these people the hour before, the sympathy just isn't there for me! Plus, they had no idea what was even going on. There was one boy who was very polite. Was very aware of our stuff and in the end we got him up to the front of the fence to see the horse drawn carriages after the wedding.

Kate and her dad on the way to Westminster Abbey. They
pretty fast on the way there.

The kids wouldn't have bothered me as much if they weren't waving flags in my face all the time either. Oh, and this one girl- age 13 or 14 thought that she was still young enough to plow her way to the front. We taught her a lesson on rudeness when I told her that the people that she just cut in front of had spent the entire night there in a tent. She didn't stand in front of us, but the message wasn't received when we saw her 5 feet down the fence...

During the ceremony we got to listen to it on the loud speakers. Most people had purchased the program with all of the hymns and reading in it and we were singing along all the way! It was such a festive time and it was obvious that the people around were really feeling like they were a part of it. Abby's updates and pictures on her phone were really helpful too! She would get a new picture of the dress or something going on and we would literally pass around her phone to the people all around us. It was so festive!

By the time that they came back down "The Mall" after the ceremony in the open carriage, Bethany and I had gotten placed on the front row. I think my bribing the people in front of us with the promise of pictures really helped. Because of this, I didn't have the waving flags as an obstacle so I was able to get some good pics. They were still going faster than I would have liked! It was hard not to be swept up in the Disney fairytale-ness of it all. Especially with his uniform and her dress and the carriage they were riding in. Everything was beautiful. The British know how to do this type of thing. You wouldn't get this is America, that's for sure!

Prince Harry and some of the kids

Pippa and the rest of the kiddos

The Queen and Prince Phillip

So close, I could count the wrinkles on ol' Queenie's face!

Both sets of parents

Kate Middleton's mum

Eugenie and Beatrice (cousins to the groom)- May I say, her fascinator was the absolute worst one I have ever seen. I think it looks like an octopus is on her head!

After everyone went by we got a bit of a breather by eating in the park and relaxing for a bit. We had decided that we were not going to try to see the couples first public kiss on the balcony because it was going to be mayhem, but someone we found ourselves there. It was so packed. At one point I was somehow being held up, but not because I was standing on my feet... Our group even got split up and I was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic.

The threat of rain never came, even though we were prepared for it. I was glad that I got to see it, and that we spent the extra effort to go early to get a good spot. Not often does this happen and it was fun for us to have it happen in the year that we are placed in England. In Chicago before we came here we talked about it and thought it was about time they got married and then when they got engaged we thought that we would be gone by the time they actually tied the knot. Luckily it happened while we were here and it fell into place with the other plans we had. It was a lovely 3 days in London will the girlies. 

"The Mall" afterwards

Some of the major streets were closed down in London and it was a bit of a surreal sight. These streets normally have thousands of cars on them, but instead had people!