Before Lunch:
1. The entire school took a field trip. Prek, 2nd, 4th, 8th, and 9th grades went to Jiu Feng Mountain. Other grades went to a local park, and the beach.
2. We started the day by cleaning up the trash, and in a culture that never uses a rubbish bin, that was a lot. Especially cigarettes. Since we didn't have 150 sets up gloves with fancy pokers for picking up trash, our kids used reusable chopsticks to pick up the trash.
3. In my group I had two prek students, two 8th graders, and one each of the rest. It was too perfect. I made a questionable decision to give the youngest students the chopsticks (which could very well have transformed into swords or any other imaginable weapons, but I was counting on their desire to clean) and I paired each young student with an older student who carried the trash bags. They were the perfect teams. The youngsters were OVEReager to pick up trash, and the older ones followed along, caring for them and making sure that the little ones didn't get to close to the water. Stress-free field trip! My job was practically done!
- The Irony -
I knew immediately that my decision to make the pairings worked when a prek student enthusiastically pounced on a small candy wrapper yelling, "TRASH!" and the helpful 8th grader held open the trash bag to accept the wrapper for the candy that he had JUST PUT IN HIS OWN MOUTH. Really?? I mean, REALLY???? When I said a culture that wasn't used to using the rubbish bins, I wasn't kidding. Not even on a wilderness clean up trip did the wrapper make it to the appropriate disposable container before landing on the ground as litter first!
4. After a quick snack break, the kiddos made art inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, an artist who uses only materials that he finds in nature to make temporary artwork, and photographs it. http://www.ucblueash.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/
From fairly simple (one of my students from last year) ...
To a little more thought ...
And still more precise ... This student worked patiently trying to find the right rocks not only to balance, but also to create the shape of a person.
To even more ambitious ... These students found two black trees lying down and decided to attempt an archway.
To breath taking ... This group of three collected fallen flower petals while collecting trash all morning, and took an hour to assemble this beautiful-ness.
On our way back down the mountain, we collected water and plant samples. Back at school, all the moms had prepared a vegetarian buffet, "from nature" ...
And my elves enjoyed a lovely picnic. May it be noted that we have Spokane-like weather. Spring will only last 2 weeks, so we take advantage of this weather while we can. Next week it will probably be too hot to function outside, and it will be back to 3 cold showers a day!
This is the part of the day when I regret to inform you that my camera battery died, which is a real shame. After lunch, the students observed water and plant samples from all three field trips sites from the morning through microscopes, and from there created their own artwork in groups of four, using recycled materials to depict the cell patterns. Too cool for school!
But the best part of e-ART-h Day perhaps didn't happen on e-ART-h Day. I brought my class set of pencils and erasers to the microscope room to share with students who forgot theirs from kinder-5th graders. Amidst the cleanup, I didn't remember to grab them and they got swept away with other materials. Come Monday morning, we had to scrounge to get enough pencils for everyone to complete their morning sentences. And only half the pencils had erasers. I looked up just in time to witness a silent exchange. Elf 1 had made a mistake, but didn't have an eraser. She mimed an exchange, and swapped pencils with Elf 2, who did have an eraser on her pencil. And both were able to continue working as if nothing had happened. I wasn't the only one observing. The entire class silently used this method to complete their sentences on the board in a timely manner. Just beautiful problem solving and team work. I love it!
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