A Short but Long Week
8 09 2006The first week is always tough, so I’m glad to see it coming to the end. Everyone has to get back into the swing of being at school, so it takes some getting used to.
This week, everyone from third to sixth grade saw me at least once. We went over the rules of the classroom, how to cleanup, how to use their sketchbook, and what is expected of them this year. I don’t care if they are the best or worst artist, but I do expect them to give their best effort for everything we do in class. We also talked about a creative way to fill up their sketchbooks or come up with ideas. We will always have a word of the week. If they have time, they can try to draw or illustrate that word without actually writing the word. For example, I asked the students how they would draw the word green without actually writing it or using the color green. They came up with drawing a stop light, grasshopper, grass, and money as ways to draw the word green. This weeks word was jump and a lot of the kids had great ideas for how to draw that.
Next week, all the classes will begin their first projects of the year. I’m always excited for these early projects because they are my favorites and the kids are always successful with them. That is why I like to teach them early on!
We also got started with blogging in the fifth and sixth grade classrooms. We talked about being responsible with what they post and how to use the blog as a place to discuss current events, not as a personal journal. In a lot of these early computer classes, we mostly want the kids to login successfully and make sure everything is working right before we dive into anything else. I’m sure we will be practicing with usernames and passwords for a couple weeks before everyone has it down.
Week one is in the books, but week two is right around the corner. It has been a good start!
