Elements of Design with Ms. Robin — The Early Learning Community First-Second Grade

This week we were hard at work on our salmon mural. Our scientists and artists created detailed sharpie line drawings of three salmon life cycle stages: egg, alevin, and fry. Together artists created a river background complete with cool, fresh water and a speckled gravel redd (nest). We are waiting for three absent students to add their contributions before we post a photo of the mural. This week we mailed our Flat Stanleys around the world to 21 different locations! We already heard back from Flat Aaron Big Bob Beatty in Uganda. We learned about the wild Kampala traffic jams where people can get stuck for hours, just trying to go a few miles. They call this “The Jam”. Several people in Kampala, Uganda use motorcycles or Boda Bodas to get around. We can’t wait to receive updates from the rest of our Flat Stanleys in the coming weeks! In writer’s workshop this week we started a unit on informational writing. We learned how to use the TIDE acronym to plan our essays. TIDE stands for topic, important ideas, details, and ending sentence. We created a shared essay about why Oregon is a great state using ideas that were collected from our Flat Stanleys exploring Oregon last month. Next week students will create their own essays using the TIDE acronym as a way to organize their notes. As usual, one of our highlights this week was music making with Ms. McKenzie. This morning Emersyn did a fantastic job representing the Otter classroom during our Friday Summit. She shared about how the Otters have a weekly popcorn stand on Tuesdays to practice counting money and making change. This afternoon Roman’s grandma, Ms. Robin, came in to led us in an art lesson about the elements of design. Ms. Robin is a retired first and second grade teacher who is passionate about art. We discussed the true primary colors: magenta, yellow, and cyan. Then students used only those colors to create many beautiful colors in our imaginary “paint factory”. We will use all this beautiful painted paper in upcoming art lessons with Ms. Robin.