Week One Fun: Storytelling, Dough Making & Frozen Finger-Paint Popsicles!

Post Contributed by Jocelyne Adkins, Program Director

Hi Families,

We had so much fun getting to know our terrific new students this first week of school! We also took great pleasure in welcoming back so many of our inspiring students from last year! This week, we eased the children into "school mode" with activities that focused on what children enjoy doing naturally through storytelling, making and creating with play-dough, and finger painting with frozen paint pops. We also went a little "stripe crazy" and used colorful squares & strips of paper to create a collective group collage. Highlighted below are some of our activities from this week ~ enjoy : )

Ashley

On Monday, we introduced a pictorial storytelling project inspired by each child's summer experiences, using a spiral structure. Students pushed the idea of spirals and used triangular, rectangular and square shaped spirals to create very personalized, illustrated stories. We love their ingenuity!!! Through the illustration process, we learned about a number of special events and trips taken by our students this summer. A few students preferred to focus their illustrations on fantasy, creating imaginary stories inspired by Minecraft. Either way, we loved the results!

Phillip

Leila

Ella

Jenna

Shlok

Shlok

Chan

Chan with Ms. Blakely

Yeoeun

Yeoeun

Ashley

Xantal

On Tuesday, we made our very own play dough ~ students at each table took turns adding and mixing the ingredients, then kneading the dough. We made red (it actually turned out pink), turquoise, yellow and purple.

Leila, Anika and Ashley

Sonia, Phillip and Chan

Leila, Ashely (middle), and Anika making purple dough

Ms. Blakely, Asa, Timmy making blue dough

Valen, Cassie, Daysha (our awesome middle school assistant) Joey, Yeoeun making pink dough

Sonia, Chan and Phillip making yellow dough

On Wednesday, we shared the colors we made so that the children at each table enjoyed all of the colors. Glitter, googly eyes, gems, sequins, colorful and bendable wire, beads and "woodsies" were provided along with a variety of clay tools to encourage exploration.

Some students enjoyed embedding objects to create impressions, others enjoyed adding decorative elements to 3-d forms or flattened shapes, and a couple children enjoyed mixing new colors : ) Tiny pinch pots, monsters, rock stars, and decorative flowers were a few of the finished items that emerged on Wednesday afternoon ~ do have a look below : )

Mark with his rock star: love the wild hair Mark!

Timmy

Timmy (note the tiny coil at the top of the head, around the blue straw ~ nice touch Timmy!)

Jenna's yellow flower using "woodsie" petals

Shlok's very tiny multicolored character

Ashley with Ms. Blakely

Valen exploring textures and materials

Valen ~ finished!

Sonia's completed artwork

Anika exploring design

Anika with Sonia

Chan with 6 newly mixed colors

On Thursday, we explored color, beginning with 2 terrific children's books: "Green" by Laura Vaccaro Seeger and "White is for Blueberry" by George Shannon. "Green" is a smart concept book that opens our eyes to the many different shades of "green" in our world. To view this book cover to cover, click here

"White is for Blueberry" helps us to see that in nature, colors may change over time, or that one's perception of color can change: for example when Shannon writes "Purple is for snow" and then we turn to page to discover "when the snow is the shadow of us". Shannon's simple, yet thought provoking concept book quickly captured the attention of our students!

To further the concept of color perception, we showed students a handful of "green" color swatches, followed by a handful of "yellow" color swatches. Then, using a single yellow-green swatch, the students were able to note that the same yellow-green swatch appeared "green" next to the yellow swatch group, yet "yellow" next to the green swatch group ; )

For our "stripe crazy" activity, we provided colorful square paper swatches with many shades of the same hue and some pre-cut paper strips. We asked the children to arrange the strips on the paper squares to create a vareity of striped designs (and to hopefully note some color interactions along the way). Our goal was for each student to create 3 striped squares, and most children successfully did so, with enough time to create any type of collage designs of their own. Since I wasn't able to take photos on Thursday, I will update this post with a picture of our group collage this week : )

Below are images of Friday's "Popsicle Paint" activity : ) Children were asked to draw any imagery of choice using a permanent black marker on watercolor paper. Then, using egg carton trays of frozen finger paint with marker cap "sticks", the students had fun adding color to their illustrations. Friday was quite humid, and the frozen finger paints were surprisingly refreshing to the touch. Completed images included an ice-cream cone, a cupcake, a rainbow, a tree, and of course, at least one "Minecraft" inspired character.

Anika and Jenna

Sonia

Ella and Shlok

Chan, Phillip and Timmy

We thoroughly enjoyed our first week with our students and are eagerly looking forward to next week! Stay tuned for new updates as we create and explore in Beye Discovery!