Beauty and The Beast!!

Wow! What a Fantastic Performance by all of the students at Sommerville Manor School who participated in Beauty and The Beast! Congratulations especially to the lead performers, Lauren, Nick and Myles who were the focus of everyone's attention and played their parts with such enthusiasm. I especially liked Chip; excellent performance Alicia!! The voices were amazing and the singing was beautiful! The sets were stupendous - designed and painted with perfection. The costumes were definitely the icing on the cake! What a beautiful gown that Belle donned at the end and the finale! Absolutely Wonderful! There is so much talent within our school I would love to be a part of it next time!!! Taking a bag full of props and Chip's costume back to the school for them is the least that I could do!

Indirect Teaching Strategy

I used a Guided Inquiry approach to teaching decopage on a bottle using tissue paper with Natalie. She wanted to decorate the glass bottle but she didn't know how so I used this Indirect Teaching strategy to guide her to use a glue and water mixture to paste on tissue paper to the bottle that she wanted to decorate and here is the result!

Credit goes to a grade 2 student, Natalie

Day 2 for Earth Day!!

After the paper mache dried the choice is to paint it blue and then paint the land on top of it OR to paint it green and then paint the water on top. Therefore we have some blue Earths and a green Earth. One of the students decided to make a bird instead of an Earth and the other student hasn't painted at all yet. Take a look at the progress of our model building after Day 2! The students were impressed with their efforts of the inital stages of the paper mache especially when they saw the Earth coming into existence as a hard round ball shape.

The next step is to continue painting. Stay tuned!!

Earth Day is Approaching!!

The Primary students are getting excited about Earth day, April 22nd, this weekend. I decided to use an Experiential Instruction Strategy to do some model building. We are going to make an Earth using Paper Mache! I first set up the Paper Mache station with smocks, balloons, strips of newspaper, and a good consistency of flour and water.

 Then I blew up a few balloons to help give the students a 'picture' of what the Earth was supposed to look like and I paper mached one of the balloons so that I could use it as an exemplar.

I taught the students how to soak the strips of newspaper in the flour/water consistency and attach it to the balloon. I kept the consistency mixed up using kraft sticks so that the students could focus on wrapping the paper mache around the entire balloon to build the model of the earth.

Here is the result after 'day one.' The students worked pretty well with the materials with the exception of a short attention span and some frustration with getting the entire piece of newsprint wet before applying it to the sphere. Somehow, they managed and are now waiting for them to dry so they can paint them next day.

Bring on the Sunshine!

I taught the Primary students to create suns using styrofoam plates, tin foil, glue and sparkles. Take a look!

By Hayden

By Sami

Primary students from JK to grade 3