You Need Love

At the beginning of this spring's First Peoples of the NW Coast storyline, we built a coastline and lush coastal forest.  Before adding humans, I asked the students what people might need to survive there.  I knew I'd elicit the requisite information I needed to elaborate scientifically: food, water, shelter.  My students are so much smarter than I.  They knew it takes more to build a life than the bare essentials.  Here are some of their responses:

Thank goodness they are my guides through the wilderness.

-ACCESS Academy, Portland Public Schools, Grade 4, 2017.

National Parks All School Storyline - Friezes

We are currently about 2/3rds of the way through an all school storyline: National Parks. I thought it might be a good opportunity to share our frieze work... Almost the same topic, but such variety...

Kindergarten Friezes:

Glacier Bay National Park

Denali National Park

Olympic National Park

Now, on to 1st Grade frieze work:

Grand Teton National Park

Redwood National Park

Biscayne National Park

And our 2nd and 3rd blends:

Bryce Canyon National Park

Everglades National Park

Acadia National Park

Yellowstone National Park

Carlsbad Caverns... with a cave full of bats!

And last, but not least, our 4th and 5th grade blends...

Hawaii Volcano National Park

Yosemite National Park

Glacier National Park

Mt. Lassen National Park

Novel-Based Topic: Kneeknock Rise

This fall my students and I explored the world of Natalie Babbit's novel, Kneeknock Rise. Many are familiar with Tuck Everlasting, for which Babbitt is most known. I would argue that Kneeknock Rise is equally as wonderful. And it is an especially perfect novel on which to base a storyline. It seems like half the work in writing a book-based topic is finding the right book. After you do, the storyline writes itself.

This novel gave us opportunities to incorporate the following curriculum: Close/Complex Reading, Vocabulary, Narrative Writing (this book is an amazing mentor-text!), Non-Fiction Reading, Fact and Opinion (legendary creatures reading and reports), Basic Economics (community study), Drama, States of Matter and Thermal-Geyser Science, Opinion Speeches... as you can see, it's one rich storyline!

Please enjoy a photographic explanation...


After doing a repeated close-read of the first 4 pages of our novel, we created prototypes for our frieze. We considered all the ideas of what needed to be included and the we set about creating the setting of our story...

















Sponge painting what would become the countryside that "lay as flat as it had been knocked unconscious."



And the stormy sky!



The homes for the "Village of Instep."



Putting it all together - notice the Megrimum's cave at the top of Kneeknock Rise.

And now, it was time to explore the main characters of our story... Each team looked for descriptions in the text to support their design of each of the 7 main characters. Then, they went to work creating the 3-dimensional characters...

Step one: covering wire base with tape and newspaper.



Step two: using plaster wrap to give our characters a hardened shell.



Step three: adding clay and pain to the hands, face and feet.



After adding cloth for clothes (gotta love a glue gun!) our characters were ready for display. The written "reports" behind each character was completed by each team based on text evidence.

We also created personal "villager" characters - paper dolls that went on the frieze.

Next, things started to happen (Incidents) in the Village of Instep...



Here we are, as "villages" asking Aunt Gertrude about her encounter with the Megrimum the night before. Next, we created artwork and poetry about what WE believe the Megrimum to look like...

And here are scenes from the Instep Fair, where our village makes most of our money every year. There were a lot of "Megrimum" items sold to visitors who come to hear the moans of the mysterious creature...





At the end of the fair, Ada dared Egan to climb the rise to see the Megrimum for himself. Egan rose to the challenge and so we sent out a search party...

Here, we are moving our characters closer to the top of the rise (and adding some thought bubbles to show what the villagers think about Egan's choice to climb the rise).
















Then, we actually climbed the rise to find Egan, calling for him and ringing our bells to keep the Megrimum away.

At the top, we read the next part of the story and found out, just like Egan did, that there actually isn't any Megrimum at the top of the rise. The moaning is actually a geyser in a cave!

Some wanted to keep believing, though...



Next we learned about geysers and investigated the change from liquid to gas (expansion!)...





We made predictions about Egan's choice to plug the geyser up in order to prove to the villagers they were wrong all along about there being a Megrimum. Egan found that most villagers were reluctant to believe him. They chose to keep believing in the Megrimum... they had good reasons to support their opinions, too!

After the story was complete, we worked on further developing our performance for culmination. Here are some images from culmination...

Shakespeare!

The 4/5 team at our school are going on an amazing journey into the worlds of Shakespeare's plays. This Shakespeare topic approaches William's work much like a book topic would - as you can see by the friezes. At the same time, the all-male Elizabethan characters are invited to join a troupe of players lead by "Lord Winston." At the end of the topic, each 4th and 5th grader will perform in two of the four plays. Take a look at their work so far...

A Midsummer Night's Dream...

The Tempest...

Julius Caesar...

Macbeth...

Characters...

World Wide Surf Tour - Frieze

After we created characters and decided to "join" the tour, we did some thinking about the places that would be good to visit as surfers. We did some map-reading and world geography - using some maps to help us with our brainstorming. We also considered what the "perfect wave" for surfing might look like. Here are a few images from our frieze-work...

Here, 2nd grade boys work on tracing our world map using a projected image of a map. We focused only on continents and oceans. As we arrived in each new country, I drew in the outline of each country and we colored them in with red crayon.

We used torn/painted paper to create our wave. We tried to use different colors to create depth and "ocean spray"

About 3-4 students worked on ripping/gluing the wave on at a time. Other students worked on other portions during this time, or continued working on their character. The girls to the left are creating a large sign that reads "World Wide Surf Tour" to go above our map, which will be placed to the right of the frieze. As we go, I will add artifacts from each country to the frieze.