Starry Night

We studied Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting, "Starry Night". The students noticed that the stars in the night sky are not actually star shaped. They are various colours of yellow all mixed together. They also noticed that the lines that Van Gogh used makes it look like it is windy in the picture. We painted our own version of "Starry Night" using white and yellow paint on blue paper. We used Q-tips to apply the paint. We used dots and lines just like Van Gogh to create our stars, moon and wind. We added white to the yellow paint to make different tints of yellow. After the paint dried we created our town silhouettes by cutting shapes out of black construction paper.

How to Catch a Star

After reading Oliver Jeffers' "How to Catch a Star" we created these beautiful watercolour paintings. First we painted the watercolour paper with water. Next we used an eye dropper to drip blue and turquoise liquid watercolour paint on the paper. The colours mixed and pooled together. Next we sprinkled some coarse salt on the paper. When the paint was dry we brushed the salt off and noticed that where the salt was, the colour is different. Finally we learned how to draw a star on yellow construction paper and then worked really hard to cut it out. We glued the star on our night sky. This art inspired us to write about how we would go about catching a star!

Nature Alphabet

Over the past few years I have been trying to reduce the amount of store bought items on the walls in the classroom and replace them with student created resources. Our alphabet is an example of this. In September we went on a nature walk and collected a variety of natural items. Back in the classroom we arranged the natural items in the shape of the letters of the alphabet. I took a picture of each letter and put it into a frame. This a great way for the kids to make the classroom their own as well as to bring a natural element into the classroom. We also worked our fine motor muscles by carefully placing the rocks and berries just so.

For our number line we went on a number hunt in the community. Armed with our iPads, we scoured the neighbourhood for numbers. We found out that numbers are everywhere!!! Our number line to 10 is made up of the pictures we took on our walk. For numbers 11-20 we used items in our classroom to build the numbers.