New Year Card

I lost the Christmas cards. But from the tips of my red and green fuzzy slipper socks to the crown of my newly shorn head I wish you a happy new year.

I don't know what I'm going to do with all these little slips of paper. Some of them my students gave me when I was student teaching, the simple love of a six or seven year old expressed in a blank slip of paper printed with hearts, or cut in the shape of a fairy or a ballet slipper. It was strangely not cathartic, upending the jar and emptying the contents to make room for this year's crop of missives. My trending for being thankful was heaviest on things working out, things working out with good people, and being greatful for good people. In fact, that pretty well sums the whole jar up.

Here's to another year of things working out and good people. And the two things together. Cheers to all the good people in my life, and the ones I get to meet this year.

koinobori - fish kites

Lakes, rivers and streams, oh my. We pretended that the rug was a boat while we read the story [some of the boys fell overboard - that's what you get for a 3:11 girls/boy class] and we made fish kites.  The kids were enthusiastic participants during the story, being cold and wet - and being thrown overboard and rescuing their friends.  Perks of a smaller class size, having the space to get everyone on an 8' x 10' rug and pretend it's a boat, and guide them through imagery.

The fish kites that we made were based off of this lesson from the Smithsonian institution. For our purposes, we weren't getting into the history of Japanese internment [way over their heads], but that's a lesson I'll be keeping in my back pocket for the future. The koinobori were a project that were INCREDIBLY easy to adapt for the 3 and 4's. We talked about how kites that they are familiar with are were similar and different to this type of kite. We talked about fish and what fish need to survive. We could very easily have talked about symmetry.


The project calls for glue - we stapled the sides together on the longest, straightest side - three to four did the trick and kept a tube shape without us needing to worry about drying time - we only see some of the kids for three and a half hours and by the time we get to the activity, we're down to an hour and a half, two hours. Glue doesn't dry that fast. We also used construction paper. While the children were coloring their fish,
I read another book, "The Rainbow Fish". It gave the children another point, however inaccurate, or reference about fish and what sorts of things fish have. It made me wish I had a real koinobori to bring in - I have child size yukatas. I'll just have to visit Japan.

Regrets -

I didn't think of having fin templates. Some of the children were very concerned about having something "exactly right", and I do a lot of "Eh, it'll be fine, do your best." While I realize that for this project this is a minimal concern, for other projects and tutorials that I attempt in the future, I will need to be aware of having templates and clearer guidelines.

Also, I went home to my parent's house over the holiday weekend - they have an overgrown patch of bamboo in their yard. While I'm not 100% certain that bamboo grows in Japan, or that it would have been accurate for display, I do know that bamboo is used as fishing rods, and that the kids would have loved having a rod for their fish rather than just string to carry it from. I wish I would have gathered some small bamboo rods.

superhero armbands

Since I've been a chronic constant poster and seem to have dropped off the face of the earth, yes I'm still alive. 15 weeks with 6-7 year olds was not enough to bulk up my immune system; two weeks into the summer and I'm not sure what I contracted but I know where it came from. Moral of the story: wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands... which may not have been enough. My class helper is down for the count with something else.

Yesterday we made quick-and-dirty bracelets with gross grain ribbon and iron-on Velcro tabs - I didn't know this beast existed, but it made my life pretty fabulous. 12 pre-cut semi-sticky so they stay kinda put where you put them hook-and-loop tabs in a box, 90 seconds with a hot steamy iron and you're done. Ka-pow. It was something like $3.50-$4 for the box, but since we're only there for a few hours and glue takes forever to dry, being able to press an iron down for a few seconds and then hand the project over to a child was pretty rewarding for me. Also rewarding was watching them play superhero afterwards. Or superhero ballerina. Whichever.

Action shots... my one and only girl for the day, for whose bracelet we made special arrangements to stitch beads on, and another friend, fixing a hinge with a thermometer and a pair of tweezers.  

The project originally called for velvet ribbon, whereupon you took rubber stamps and embossed the velvet with the stamp image using the iron - something about laying the ribbon with the velvet fibers facing down on the rubber stamp and holding the iron on it for so many seconds... Right... Because I have a million tiny rubber stamps laying around. When was the last time you saw velvet ribbon or a rubber stamp the size of a nickel or dime? It sounds very cool, in theory! I checked around the Metro area at three different craft stores and could find neither velvet ribbon or rubber stamps. Granted, I didn't check at a specialty place in the Strip for the ribbon, but at that point in the hunt, without the stamps, there was no point in having the ribbon.

Also, when you have a class with a ratio of 4:1 boys to girls, sometimes 13 or 14:1, bracelets sometimes have to get spun as superhero armbands. But they had fun making them anyway. There were stickers involved. Lots of stickers. We had the usual hitches that made this less than ideal - not having a completely accurate head count until the minute we did the project means there's only so much prep I can do ahead of time. In this case it meant just having everything assembled, because I knew if I had made the bracelets ahead of time for them to decorate, there would have been an extra child going without.

When preparing the ribbon, I measured the length of the ribbon needed on one of the children's arms, then cut it about an inch longer. When it was time to iron, I folded about half an inch of the ends of the ribbon under the Velcro square so that the bracelets had a nice finished look. The width of the tabs was the same as the ribbon, so folding over the end and tucking it under the tab when ironing took care of any fraying ribbon. I also tried to put the loopy part of the Velcro [the softer bit, not the hook part] on the part of the bracelet that would fold over and lay facing down on their skin, because the hooks would be very irritating, especially on baby skin [it would bother me]. How do you figure this out? if you have the bracelet facing you with the decorated part facing up, the hooked, scratchy tab would be the one you put on the top with the decorations. The softer loopy tab would go on the underside - you wouldn't be looking at it.

erosion. it'll take your dirt away.

We talked about erosion in class today. Because it's St. Patrick's day on Sunday, I brought in a shamrock plant for the kids to look at as part of the erosion demo. Some of the questions I chose to not to answer included:

"Why is there only one flower?"
"Does it smell like anything?"
"Why is the underside purple?"
"Why doesn't the flower look like clover?"

Well... I don't have all the answers. And technically, the shamrock is an oxalis plant and looks like this.

And they wanted to know why I used coffee grounds instead of sand, or actual dirt. And I really didn't want to get into the specifics of hydrophobia with them, and how the coffee grounds were going to mimic wet sand and suck up the water easily and move the way I wanted them to.

However. They got the picture. Coffee grounds, in a pile, at the top of a tilted cookie sheet, when mixed with "rain" from a watering can, would "erode" down the side of the cookie sheet hill. But the dirt in the pot, even when the pot was tilted on it's side when it was "raining" wasn't really going anywhere, because there were roots holding it in place.

Mission accomplished.

you say toe-mato, I say to-mah-to

I really, really want to try this - recycling wine bottles into planters. All you need to cut the glass is a little yarn, some acetone [aka nail polish remover], a bowl of ice water, and a match. My fingers are itching. 

We've been talking in 1st grade about recycling in social studies - and we will be again in science in short order here. I'm glad we're talking about it, because they need to see the connections between the different disciplines, but honestly, the PC stuff is getting on my nerves... how about we actually talk about earth science? Perhaps expounding on natural resources. For example, glass comes from sand... we can recycle glass [yay!] And this is what we do with clay... yay pottery and other things... Minerals are not just in our coins, we need some for our bodies, to be strong and healthy... alas, no. Let's not even get into how we can recycle our coffee grounds, egg shells, vegetable peelings and the like! Woohoo, compost! Because that is recycling! And reusing! And it's great for the earth!

We talked about sand, clay and humus last week. There wasn't even an explanation of how to say humus in the book. [You say it like hu-man. Say it with me: hu-mus.] The children know how to say clay and sand; it's probably been in their vocabulary since the time they were six months old and were putting everything in their mouths. But words like humus aren't even in most adults vocabulary, unless they happen to either pursue higher education in the geosciences or botany fields, or are really wild about gardening [or have dads that fill all those categories...] For the record, I am not any one of those people.  The book that the kids use show people picking up trash, putting plastics, glass and paper in the recycling bins, and wrapping yarn around cans for pencil cups. Which is nice. Dont' get me wrong. Because in parts of my section of town, they aren't up on all of that. I'm dodging dead bicycles and baby dolls, and worse. 

Also,  I've learned two things being in first grade: at the end of the day, the trash bin and the recycling bin end up together in the same container. So... why are we bothering?

The second thing I learned in first grade is what humus is. It's Latin, literally "earth, ground". I already knew what hummus is. You can ask Miss Honey. I make a pretty darn good hummus. Om, nom nom. 

So. Let's review:

HUMMUS                                            HUMUS 

The one on the left you eat. The one on the right... no contest. You aren't eating dirt. Who would do that? Truth be told, I know a few kids that would do it on a dare, but wise cracks aside.
It's like dessert and desert. One is something you want to eat. The other is full of sand. 

"I'd rather eat two desserts and walk through one desert"

No one wants to eat sand or dirt. Eat your double SS's and MM's.  And M&M's.

monoprint hearts for your sweeties

 Coinciding with a math lesson on symmetry, on Valentine's Day. I mean, how does it get better than that?

 Tempra paint, oak tag half hearts, paint bushes, construction paper, crayons.
Only trouble was that the paint dried very quickly and some of the students found themselves with a monoprint that was less than desirable - also, avoid words, like our friend in the top left.  And a final word, for the sake of expediency, consider pre-picking the color of the paper and pre tracing the hearts. If there's time to kill, make them do it. If time will likely be an issue, mandatorily hand them a pretraced half shape and say "paint inside the lines". In this case, it doesn't stifle their creativity.

the secret life of pasta butterflies

Yes, it's possible to do a lesson about the life cycle of a butterfly without actually buying butterflies. Not that I wouldn't have loved to do that, but no room, no time, wrong time of year. 

If you have the resources, make a Power Point, or a Prezi. Or find and edit a Smartboard lesson. Or find a Prezi. Or find several really good books about butterflies - they'll love a "true/false" book, with facts like, "True or False, can butterflies taste their food with their feet?" [true fact].

And if you're in the first grade, make a life cycle. On a paper plate. 

WITH PASTA!

Orzo for your egg. Some kind of rotini for your larva/caterpillar. Mini shell pasta for the chrysalis/pupa. And Farfalle. Which, in Italian, literally means "butterfly". So you're not eating "bow-tie" pasta, you're eating "butterfly" pasta. 

And if you're the student teacher in charge, pre-mark the paper plates with Sharpie quarters. Trust me.