Animatedly Speaking

The first graders are the latest grade to try their hands at Fablevision's Animation-ish.  

Hadley, the art teacher, and I introduced Animation-ish and demonstrated how to navigate through the options and tools.  I love introducing this expressive tool with her because she brings all of her art, creative theory, knowledge and vocabulary to the introduction.  

The students have been learning about oceans and ocean mammals, so we decided to make this an opportunity for them to express their understanding about oceans and ocean mammals. 

We had them working in pairs, and as with the second graders, watching the students collaborate was the best part of the project.  They had to decide on the ocean mammal, the size of the mammal with respect to the space, any other objects in the picture and when each of then would draw. 

Here is a glimpse of our afternoon and their beautiful expressions of ocean mammals.  I love how they have used this new voice to speak about what they have learned. (Note to self: turn off the volume on my phone :))

More Lemonade-style squeezed poetry!

Inspired the the fifth graders' poems, the 3rd graders tried their hands at creating poems like those in Bob Raczka's book, Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word.

This is very challenging poetry to write! I think they are off to a great start:

One student chose porcupines and I got inspired to play:

Porcupines
          I
                s
              e
              e
                s
     r   up
     r      i   s
               e.

I 
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