Yesterday I went into my mother's Year 3 class to help with art. Every now and then she does a fabulous activity day called 'round-and-round-the-classroom' where the kids go from table to table doing subjects in the order of their choice. It gives them some autonomy, and they love it – every two conventional subjects they do (like literacy and number) they can go to a 'fun' activity. It being almost the end of the school year here she wanted some nice covers made for the Memory Books they've been constructing. The kids hear all about me over the course of the year, and wanted me to come in for a day, so I joined them to make sure the art table stayed under control.
The original activity was to spatter the covers, but we had a small crisis – possibly due to the staticy weather, the acrylic paint (however much watered down or not) refused to spatter, and just dropped on the paper in huge blobs. >.< However, I haven't spent years having various artistic accidents for nothing, and instantly changed the activity to make stars out of the blobs using a matchstick to drag the paint around.
Later on I found some different paint in the art cupboard, that allowed us to spatter and then add blobs of acrylic to make stars.
I think they came out fabulously, don't you?
There were six paint colours for the kids to choose from, and I let them do almost everything by themselves, except for putting on the blobs of paint – because year threes, however well behaved they are (and they were gorgeous) can get quite silly with really wet paintbrushes and blobs. =P
After school my friend Tilly (who has been helping out at various schools since finishing her teacher training) and I covered all the books, and we were done! =)
Wow, you Mum's class must be so well behaved to allow her to have an activity day like that. My Dad's class is made up of all the problem kids from the school, so there's no way he'd ever try that.
ReplyDeleteMy mother has a few problem kids too, Imogen, she just makes sure there are consequences for playing up. She uses a schedule with the fun activities in a box at the bottom - if someone plays up, she just crosses out the box, and they're stuck doing just the boring activities, and then get extra boring stuff when they're finished what's on the schedule. If the whole class acts up, she stops the whole thing, and they have to just sit and fill in their worksheets by themselves, with no getting up and moving, or choice of what to do next. She's had to do that a couple of times – but I don't think she's ever had to do it twice with the same class! =P
ReplyDeleteShe's also recently discovered Classroom Discipline 101, and is *extra* militant – but in a nice way. ^.^