Mr. Mills Blog

With midterms going out next week, this is first time I’m handing out grades. If you have any questions about your child’s grade, please look at the parent letter for this year to see the rubric. And, please feel free to contact me.

On to fine arts, the 3rd graders have finished their aliens. Mr. Brown and I hope to have these on Art Sonia and hanging in the hallway very soon. This week, we started working on flip books. It is a lesson that Mr. Brown has taught in the past, so I decided to give it a shot. We started by showing the students part of The Incredibles and talked about how animation worked. We discussed how each individual picture in an animation is called a frame and television shows 30 frames per second. Then, the students began storyboarding their own 20 frame animation. They were all very excited.

Above are a couple examples of the students rhythm paintings. They are hanging in the hallway right now. We are also in the middle of creating high contrast pictures. It is a very difficult process but the students are really putting forth a lot of great effort. Since their faces don’t look like they expect them to look, it is tough for them to just outline the parts that see on the page. They are still tracing their face and will soo fill in their face with a permanent marker.

The 5th graders are just finishing or about to finish their weaving. Mr. Bynum’s class has taken them home, and Mr. Rowell’s class will take them home next week. Since I did not have enough time to grade this project before the midterm, every student is getting a B for their midterm. The weaving grade will most likely be different from their midterm grade.

Above are a couple examples of the students emotion painting. They are all currently hanging in the hallway. Now, we are working on Frank Lloyd Wright inspired tiles. They created designs in their sketchbooks and then used black strips of paper to layout the design on a large white sheet of paper. These end up looking great on the ceiling.

Finally, the logins on the computer are finally getting some use. I went ahead and activated the passwords for all of the students. The students are a little upset that their passwords changed and they are more difficult to remember, but we are going to have them use cards with their passwords on it when they come into the computer lab. Hopefully, though, they will eventually not need them.

Enjoy the long weekend!