African Musical Performances

It has been entirely too long since my last post! We just finished up our unit on African music & dance, where we combined visual art, dance, and drumming to create group performances. My last post discussed the creation of the Djembe drums with papier-mâché; they turned out beautiful! Groups collaborated to plan for the paintings on the drums, choosing a design that shows cohesion. Some groups wanted their decorations to be alike, some chose one element to repeat throughout the designs, and one group even created an entire scene when their drums were put together! I had students use acrylic paint this semester versus the tempera paint last semester used, which yielded much nicer results. The colors are so much brighter and covered the newspaper fully.

 

Check out the Virtual Art Show for many more beautiful drums! For the performances to take place, students had a dance lesson on some traditional African dance moves. They combined some traditional steps with popular dance moves to create their routine that went with their drum rhythm. The students had a blast coming up with routines and sharing them with their classmates. I will need permission from students, but I should be posting some snippets on Twitter to share what they came up with. 

Next, students are working together to discuss our classroom culture, taking a closer look at what we all hold special to ourselves and how we may share that with one another. I didn't create class flags at the beginning of this semester because I was so excited to jump into our first project (and get to know everyone's names through it), so we will be creating our class flags right before Spring Break. I will post an update next week to show off symbols for the class flags!

Class Flags Build Community

During the first week of school students were introduced to "culture" in many of their classes. In CA, we talked about how individuals can belong to a specific culture, but we can also have a shared culture within the classroom. Students first brainstormed a list of things that were important to them and then discussed their lists with their tablemates. The entire table then had to generate a list of similarities that they shared with one another. Many cultural commonalities classmates shared were friends, sports, food, and technology. Each table worked together to design icons that symbolized part of their culture to add to a collaborative flag. Some tables displayed great collaboration by working on one icon together, taking turns designing, drawing, and coloring. Once all the icons were created, the class voted on the final design and layout of the overall flag. Each flag is completely unique and visually symbolizes the community the five classes have already established.

pets, friends, family, sports, sleeping, cell phones, Fortnite, video games, teal

food, trampolines, music, sports, dogs, family, football, art

friends, dogs, money, family, sports, Internet, water

friends, family, food, dogs, sports, art, music

Girl/Boy Scouts, entertainment, food, sports, Starbucks, family, friends

5th Grade

5th grade has been doing a tremendous job working on their assignments both in and out of the classroom. During the month of November, students were given another Doodle Calendar to complete; this time, the calendar was predominantly comprised of depictions of the Greek gods or goddesses we discussed in class. Creating a drawing of a symbol or pyhsical representation of each god or goddess helped students practice for the subject matter of their two Ancient Greek projects as well as help them to remember the significance of each god or goddess in Greek mythology. Here are a few of the outstanding Doodle Calendars:

Students have been using Chromebooks in class to access the Ancient Greek Symbaloo I put together in order to plan their Greek Vase compositions. Students had to chose any vase shape to draw and fill with either a scene, a character, or a symbol from Greek mythology, and complete it with a variety of Greek-inspired patterns. Students planned the drawings out in their sketchbooks first and have been working on transferring their ideas to their handmade scratch art paper. I am so pleased with the outcome of this project! I have never tried using scratch art for this project, and as it is more difficult because students must work slowly and have a secure plan, the final product is beautiful! The last update I posted including rough draft drawings from 5A, so here are a few I snapped from 5B today:

You will just have to wait to see the final artwork when I update the Virtual Art Show next week!