The Senses of a Scientist

The XP children and I began our year of inquiry by fine-tuning our sensory, observation skills!  And where better to begin than sunflowers!

Smelling the flower and stems...

Tasting with sunbutter....We decided it tastes like the flower smells... its smooth, salty, a little sweet, sticky and just plain gooood!!!

We smelled,

It feels sticky in some areas, smooth in others but everyone agreed that it sounds crunchy...

And then we spent a long while looking at the flower from a variety of angles....

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We then recorded our data on paper with graphite and colored pencils!  

More to Come!!!

Grape fun and observations in Ward Hobbs

The backyard grapes are at the peak of ripeness.

So the children helped with another harvest and carefully stripped each grape from its stem in preparation for another round of grape juice!

We also harvested the potatoes and beets from the back yard and while doing so we found a wonderful praying mantis.

This inspired some great conversations and Vida supported the children in observing our new friend and recording our findings in science journals.

Inside the children experimented with different materials on a black drawing surface.

It was another fun filled week in Ward-Hobbs!

Emerging Themes in 440

Welcome to our second studio week in 440!  Look what we've been up to!

As the season prepares to shift toward the colorful days of autumn we are discovering bugs glorious bugs!!!

And to celebrate, the children have been drawing insects using Prisma pencils on black cardstock...

Creating insects from loose parts...

And recording observations in liquid water color and graphite on mixed media paper.

Observational Drawing:

Harvest season is ramping up and the children are always eager to help prepare natures bounty for a gustatory delight.  This week we focused on apples!

An early emphasis on Observational Drawing helps us to slow down and really look at the subject with curiosity and precision. 

And the drawings communicate the time spent getting to know each subject.

Cooking:

The studio is so glad to welcome BJ back for a year of collaborative cooking!!!

Today we made apple-mixed fruit butter and it was DELICIOUS!!!

Each child is bringing home some butter to share, but if you’d like to make some too the recipe is super easy! We mostly used apples, with a few peaches, strawberries and even a plum added in (all but the strawberries came from trees at school or from home), add sugar to taste, a little water, some lemon juice, a dash of salt, a bit of cloves and a good shake of cinnamon. Cook low and slow for a long while and then purée. Bon appétit!

XP Corner:

Drawing, cooking and fun in Ward Hobbs

What a wonderful week in the Ward Hobbs classroom! Absolutely wonderful. Here’s a glimpse :

Observational Drawing:

Beets grown in our garden formed the inspiration for this week’s observational drawing. 

Observational Drawing helps us to slow down and really observe the subject.  Look at the detailed drawings. Need I say more?

We had so much fun with first round of beet drawings that  decided to pick another one. We were astonished by its size!

Which inspired even more drawing!

To further celebrate nature’s bounty I harvested apples from my home tree and BJ collected crab apples from the trees in the front of the school and together we made apple butter with the children!

The recipe is simple: lots of apples, sugar to taste, cinnamon, cloves, lemon juice, a dash of salt and some water. Cook long and slow in the crock pot, whisk it smooth and serve! Yum!!!

Dramatic Play:

We brought in some wonderful wooden airports with ramps and pulleys for the children of Ward Hobbs to use.Thier travel play is a joy to watch and their conversations are connecting nicely with the classrooms geography materials.  (Notes on play at home…Encourage your child to enjoy play for its own sake. They needn’t look to you for affirmation about the joy of an activity. Play, by definition, is a reward in and of itself. Redirect them back to their own joyful barometer whenever possible with observations rather than praise… “I see you have lined up all your cars. That took a lot  of work. How do YOU feel about that?” .)

What do you do when there’s no people to populate your airport? Make your own!!! (Hint: that’s why I removed the people😉)

XP Corner:

To extend the XP story writing project, the children and I thought about what matters most to them before using the language of drawing to communicate our ideas on paper. Our observational drawings earlier in the week helped us to slow down and really focus on communicating, in line and color, what we love. Here are a few examples:

Stay tuned next week to see what else we get up to!

440 is back in the studio!

I am so happy to have the studio open and running for 440! Today we explored observational drawing using natural materials from the backyard and surrounding neighborhood. I set out brown paper, 6B pencils, black pens, white Prisma pencils and water soluble graphite.

The children took their time really looking at the leaves and grapes and seeds on the table and drawing what they saw using the materials at hand.

Once our botanical illustrations were complete we added labels.

Here are a few of their wonderFULL creations!

XP Corner:

The 440 XP is interested in oceans! And things that inhabit the ocean, particularly: sharks, mermaids, sea monsters and rainbow fish!

So we began our afternoon in the studio, talking about the layers of ocean and how light has to filter through so much water. In fact the deepest ocean is darkest black. 

To further our thinking, we gradated shades of blue from lightest to dark, then created our own layered oceans using contact paper and colored tissue

Stay tuned next week when we will populate our oceans with our favorite oceanic creatures!

Ward Hobbs is back in the studio!

The studio is up and running! This week in Ward-Hobbs we are focused on observational drawing using some natural materials from the playground as inspiration.

I set out graphite pencils 6B, white prisma colors, and black pens. No color. One of the children asked me for some green and I said what do you see on the table that we might be able to use. She discovered a green tomato leaf and we tried rubbing it on the paper.

I had placed some grapes on the table as well, from the outdoor arbor, and one child discovered that she could remove the purple skin and rub that onto the paper for a violet hue. 

Another child chose some sunflower petals and exclaimed, “It works! It is a very faint yellow Angelina but it IS yellow.” And it was indeed.
The resulting drawings were beautiful and subtly infused with natural colors.

XP Corner:

The Ward-Hobbs XP class is beginning a writers workshop and story telling unit. The teachers and I agreed to begin with a studio inquiry inspired by ancient cave paintings.

The XP children joined me outside where we talked about our ancient ancestors living in caves and telling stories inspired by the things that mattered to them: community, animals and the hunt. And in order to write their stories they didn’t use an alphabet emulating sounds, rather they drew pictures. Pictures tell a story!

We discussed the limitation of materials our ancestors had at their disposal and agreed to write our picture stories on brown paper (no caves nearby) using three shades of watered-down clay (a gray, red and white) and charcoal. 

The results were positively wonderFull!