Friday, January 21, 2022

1/21/2022

Celebrating Elyse

Earlier this week, we celebrated Elyse's birthday. The Tucker KW crew interviewed her and created the birthday gift. The gift incorporates some things we knew about Elyse, as well as some techniques that KW had recently used.

We used hot pink and silver, two colors that Elyse mentioned in her interview.
Elyse likes watercolor paper and said that stars were her favorite shape. Therefore, we made plenty of watercolor stars.
In the interview process, Elyse told us her age. We included one star for each year that she has been alive.
Through our work with origami, the class became good at paper folding. This helped as we made accordion-folded strips of paper.
The overall design of the gift was inspired by the work that the Tucker Room is doing on the night sky!

Children and families also sent in messages and gifts. Thanks to all who made Elyse's celebration special!

More Mosaics!

We've been working for a long time on mosaics and the end is in sight! As the Tucker children filled the remaining sections with grout, we noted how adept and independent children have become with this experience. For example, Giacomo coached Jill on how thick to mix the grout. As children worked to fill in space with grout, Giacomo also repeated his advice, "Use the spoon for bigger spaces, and the knife for smaller spaces." As children continued their work, C.C. and Lochie took on the task of cleaning the grout off of the tile pieces. The results are stunning and we hope to have them hanging for all to appreciate next week!

More materials!

We're finishing up a lot of projects this week, and using a variety of materials and experiences in the process. In Tucker Room last week, children started making individual weavings for the photo display above the message mailboxes. Although this display was completed yesterday, some children are choosing to work on more weavings that incorporate natural materials as well as paper and cloth.

Last week in the morning program, Tucker children made clay creations. This afternoon, children finished glazing them and they will be fired first thing Monday morning! We can't wait to see these treasures come out of the kiln.

Drawing Portraits

As we have noted before, representational drawing is difficult. This week, both groups drew portraits of teachers. Since the beginning of the year, we have noticed children including more details and sense of proportion in their drawings. As we review the children's work, we had the following observations and questions.

For the most part, children drew a teacher with whom they were familiar.
Although children were looking only at head shots, they all chose to include the bodies of the teacher in the portrait. Were they influenced by others, by the size of the paper, or by their own imagination.
We looked carefully at the details that the children included. What shape were the eyes? Who included hands, fingers, toes? Who added background details?
Only girls drew portraits. Were boys just engaged in other things? How can we draw more children, including boys to this process?

We'll consider these and other questions as we move forward with other drawing experiences.