Here is a note from our music teacher, Mrs. Markstrum, regarding this coming Tuesday:
Dear Lower School Families,
Laguna students want to share a few more songs with you. Next Tecolote Tuesday, 6/6, will be our last Tecolote Tuesday of this school year. During the assembly, a Disney Themed performance with small groups and solos will be presented by the students. Students in small groups and solos have come in to open music time and requested to share their talents with the group. Please attend if possible.
As promised, here are some of the wonderful popcorn poems the students wrote this week:
I hear popping, yum. I see yellow butter melting. I smell butter, yum. I feel the hot stove — yikes. I taste popcorn. The end.
I hear popping and shaking. I see popcorn and they’re popping. I smell butter and salt. I feel bumps. It’s light. I taste it. It is sweet, mmm. It’s good.
I hear the popcorn kernels falling and popcorn popping. I see salt as white as clouds. I smell fire and butter and steam that’s warm. I feel fluffy and warm popcorn.
I hear popping sounds and smell salty kernels. I see multicolored kernels too! I feel warmth. It is warm! And now it’s finished! Now we eat! It’s good and crunchy! Now it’s gone.
Can’t you just taste and smell the popcorn? Time for a snack!
We are continuing to write poetry in these last few weeks of school. Last week, we experimented with acrostic and cinquain poems. This week, we returned to free verse poems which allowed us to focus on using our senses and describing words by writing a poem about making and eating popcorn. Just like we walked in the garden to prepare for our garden poems, we made popcorn to prepare for our popcorn poems!
I took small groups of students into the kitchen to take notes as we made popcorn on the stove. Many students had made popcorn in the microwave or with an air popper, but only a handful had made it on the stove. I bought multi-colored (organic!) popcorn which gave the students that much more opportunity to describe what they saw.
We put a little bit of vegetable oil in a heavy, lidded pan and turned the heat onto medium-high. Then, we added a layer of kernels to the bottom of the pan and put the lid on.
The students described the sound of the pan and kernels moving across the burner as I shook the pan back and forth. While we waited, we talked about why popcorn kernels pop when heated. (Each kernel contains a small amount of moisture which, when heated, turns to steam, expands, and explodes from the kernel.) We began to smell the oil heating up and, finally, we heard a pop! The students reacted with excited giggles and we had to refocus so that we could listen carefully to the sounds. Some students described the popping as rain-like, while others imagined acorns hitting the sidewalk.
Thinking about our popcorn experience
When the popping began to slow, we counted 5 seconds between pops to know that the popcorn was ready. We took off the lid, added a touch of salt, and dished up our snack, paying attention to our sense of taste and touch.
Tasting our samples
Tomorrow, we will use our notes to write poems about popcorn. Be sure to check back to see how they turned out!
We are beginning our final writing unit of the school year, and it’s one of my favorites: poetry. To begin, we have been discussing the differences between poetry and prose, and we have really focused in on descriptive language. I told the students that poems are sometimes called “word paintings” because poets paint vivid images in the reader’s mind using only words. We also talked about when and why a poet might choose to “break” a writing “rule” in a poem to give a specific effect. By the time we reviewed some examples, the students were itching to start creating their own poems.
Yesterday, we reviewed our senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Today, we exercised paying close attention to those senses as we went on a “mini-field trip” to our school’s garden. The students took notes on what they heard, felt, saw, smelled, and tasted in the garden. (Actually, we just imagined what one might taste in a garden because we visited a flower garden.)
Then, we came back to class to write our own free-verse poems. I am so impressed by the creativity of these students! Their beautiful work speaks for itself:
I hear birds chirping. I see spiky leaves and red, white, purple, and pink flowers. I smell mint leaves and oranges. I feel the cool breeze. I taste strawberries and mint leaves.
I see a bunch of birds. I hear them tweeting, too. I smell flowers and nectar, don’t you? I feel a soft breeze and red and white roses, too. I’m feeling a rough bench and fresh cut grass, too.
I am so excited to see these budding poets develop after such a wonderful introduction!
They did it! The Kindergarten and first grade students presented our play, “Ordinary Mary and Ordinary Jerry’s Extraordinary Deed” to the school and a parent audience today. They remembered their lines, sang the songs, and acted their parts with great success. I’ll let their work speak for itself with some videos:
I want to thank Mrs. Delwiche for partnering with me on this project. We also owe a huge thanks to Ms. Abrams for painting the sets, Mrs. Markstrum for helping with the music, and Mr. Surber and Ms. Stark for their help with the sound. Here’s a link to Mrs. Delwiche’s blog, where you can find some additional footage:
Creativity is our Swooper Citizens theme for the month of March. The first grade and Kindergarten classes are practicing creativity in art, science, music, writing, and problem solving, and we want to help others tap into their creativity, too! For our service learning project this month, we are collecting art and craft supplies to put together art kits for the Pediatrics Department at Cottage Hospital.
This is where you come in! Please read through the list below and consider donating one or more of the items we brainstormed. We will assemble the kits on Tuesday, March 21st, so please send any donations to school by then. We really appreciate your help!
You can download a copy of this list on the Documents page linked at the top of the blog, in case you want to bring it on your next shopping trip. Thank you for helping!
For the next few weeks, we will focus on creativity during Swooper Citizens. We kicked it off today by posing the following scenario:
Imagine that you are making a book about animals. Your classmate walks by and drips a splatter of paint right onto the first page! What will you do?
Students’ answers ranged from, “Cry!” to “Ask the teacher for a new paper.” Eventually, someone suggested that they might try to incorporate the unexpected splatter into their work. Following along with this idea, we watched part of this video:
We watched the video beginning at 3:15 and stopping at 5:50, but the whole thing is pretty fun if you have time for it!
Barney Saltzberg is the author of the book Beautiful Oops, which shows how common “mistakes” can be turned into beautiful and unexpected works of art. We explored this book together before watching the remainder of the video, in which Mr. Saltzberg demonstrates his technique for turning squiggles and tears into fanciful characters and story-starters.
After such a great example, we were inspired to create our own “beautiful oopses.” We gave each student a piece of “flawed” construction paper. Some pieces had as many as three big holes in them! The students quickly got to work modifying each paper into something new using markers, (clean) tissues, tape, and other supplies. Some added their own crinkles and rips to make something wonderful and unique.
We challenged the students to get creative the next time something unexpected happens to their work. Who knows? Maybe what might have once been considered a huge mistake will turn into the biggest masterpiece of all!
