Projects

So I decided that it's time to talk about school.

We are in our 4th week and it is definitely a different way of thinking. It is fun and is stretching me. It usually has me feeling inadequate as a human being but also has me excited to learn tons of new things. So far I decided that I need to be far better at drawing, need to learn to play the harmonica and the guitar, relearn video editing software and the list goes on and on.

But enough about me and on to my kidos and their great projects. Remember that these projects have been 100% student generated ideas. Also most of the learning seems to be about negotiating with others, how to communicate and how to keep going when something gets hard and you want to avoid it.

The "movie group" was interested in building and destroying block cities (surprise, surprise) but then got bored and moved on to clay where they made a mummy out of modeling clay and a tomb out of an egg carton. And then they got bored of that and moved onto some funny little chubby clay guy. But now they are making a clay animation movie about a giant mummy who tried to destroy New York City but gets stopped by a random hand that comes out of the sky and squishes him. It combines the two previous ideas into a new idea. They spent a few days making hand drawn flip books to experiment with single pictures being strung together to give the illusion of movement. Now they are very purposefully working to build a set for the movie and often refer to pictures of a city to see that theirs looks as similar as possible. We'll see how the filming goes.

The "play group" started out with fashion design. It was soooooo cute to see them sew. We have a miniature sewing dummy they put their clothes on to sew them up. Eventually they decided that the clothes they were making could be costumes for characters in a play. The next difficult step was to draw each character in the costume and develop a character profile. Lately they have been trying to hammer out a story line by sketching each scene on a storyboard. They often have to perform for peers who give them feedback on their play about how clear it is for the audience. These kids are surprisingly honest and good at giving feedback to each other. The peers helped the play writers to see that they really did need a narrator after all. They also helped the writers realized that there was no real beginning to their play. The girls could see their point but were stuck about how to begin a story. They have had great success looking to the book we are reading aloud as a class as a model to solve major story problems like characters development, setting and plot.

The story line is pretty adorable. It is about a princess named Hermiany(sp?) who lives with her mother Lydia in a "royal castle" by the sea. And also their castle is on stilts because it it by the sea. One day when Hermiany is getting ready to go to the ball for a beauty contest the wicked witch shows up on her broom and sets a spell on Queen Lydia. Luckily Hermiany gets her magic wand from the basement and is able to make the witches wand go nuts before any more damage can be done. Well the witch gets mad and then storms off to the ball where she looses the beauty contest. If Hermiany had been able to go to the contest she would have won. The next day when the witch is looking on the internet for a new wand Hermiany is secretly setting up a net trap for the witch which the witch falls into etc. etc.

Another group is building their own table soccer game and has had to evaluate their building materials and experiment with new ones to find what works best.

The fourth group is building the most detailed doll size house with everything you could possibly think of to go inside, including a mini solar system to hang in the teenagers room.

So far... SOOOOO FUN!