Happy Halloween!

We aren't "celebrating" Halloween at school.  I'm going to assume that most people don't "celebrate" it... we just all partake in Halloween activities.

So we are instead having Fall Fest at school.

Complete with a "spirit" week and pumpkin carving competition.

Today was obviously costume day.  Nothing scary could be worn, nothing with weapons and no masks.  So, what did I go as?

I posted this picture a while ago

Asking what we thought this could be turning into

I gathered my inspiration from here

Originally seeing this photo on Pinterest

After some hunting around for a non scandelous adult version of this I came across this lovely blog

Tales of a Trophy Wife

and got to working making my version of a peacock costume.  

I took ideas from both costumes and here are some tips when making it:

Unless you know you are getting a great deal at the fabric store do not buy your felt there.  I think I could have saved a bundle on the felt if I had boughten those small sheets of it at Michaels.

I believe I ended up buying 2 meters of black tulle and 1 meter of each blue and purple.  I wish I would have boughten 3 meters of black though.

I tied the black tulle onto a ribbon... the black tulle sticks out further than the coloured ones.  Then I tied everything else onto a second ribbon which I attached onto the first black ribbon (this seems very confusing but it's not).  Then all I do is tie the ribbon around my waist.  Easy peasy.

I'm planning on wearing it with black boots.

I considered putting a little glue on the back of each felt feather so that it wouldn't flip the wrong way... but never got around to it (and I was a little worried it would somehow ruin everything).

Another tip:  I bought a bunch of peacock feathers at Michaels with one of their 40% off coupons (they have them all the time).  The bunch came together and were glued onto this giant stick.  I just pulled every feather off of it (I had to cut them all pretty short to stick in my hair anyways).  I THINK this was cheaper then purchasing the feathers individually.  I must have priced it out in store.  

I already had peacock feather earrings so those were free!

What were you for Halloween?

This Week at School

-  I had my first ever observation as a teacher!... results pending (I haven't met with the admin about it yet)

- We started (and almost finished) these adorable owl toilet paper tube things in art.  They are pretty cute.  Hopefully they will stick to the bulletin board.  (I left my phone in the city the day we made these and then had a meeting in the city the following day (Friday) so I never got a picture of them.

-  Almost finished unit 1 in math!

-  I made students write newspaper articles and thought the lesson was a little unfocused but my students handed in awesome stories!  So proud!... now to work on the editing process.  (lesson will be posted soon).  The articles were so good that I stuck them all in duotangs for the class to read.

-  Ad projects got posted on the wall.

-  French students are ready for another quiz!  Colours, weather, and seasons will be tested on Tuesday!  We move on to parts of the body this week (I put up a giant scarecrow for us to label on the board)

-  We started a novel study in ELA and most of the kids are super into the book!  Huzzah!  Many of them are reading WAY ahead.

Not many photos this week due to me forgetting my phone in the city.

Ad posters

The month is almost over and we have been busy on the student blogs!

Stay tuned for a look at my Halloween costume!

What I Wore

I was going to post another outfit that involved me wearing jeans to school but then decided against it...

 I don't ALWAYS wear jeans.

Those are black tights... not sweats and not pants (even though they look a little big).

I paired it with some black boots (sometimes I wear tights that only go to just below the knee and will pair it with sandals though)

I'm excited to show off what I'll be wearing next week.  

It's "spirit week" AND halloween

which means pajamas and my awesome halloween costume (which I did manage to finish)

And no, my black pants still aren't hemmed.

Optical Illusion Art

As promised here is one of the art projects that we did over the last month (in my opinion it took us WAY too long to get finished... still looking for a way to keep all the kids at relatively the same point in a project.

We always have art right after recess (and use 2 periods for it... which means it takes us till lunch).  They also will often come in and expect to be given a chance to eat their snack inside the classroom.  For the first month of school I obliged with a snack and story time but now they either eat it outside or eat it while I'm talking to them about what we will be doing that class. 

 Ain't nobody got time for snack and story.  

Anyways, we started this lesson when snack and story was still very much in existence in our room.

I had gone to the public library in the city to pick up 3 books for this lesson on optical illusions.

The pictures in these books are amazing.  Depending on how you look at them you might see 2 different things.  The students enjoyed trying to see the 2 different ways to see each picture.  I then put all 3 books on the back counter in our room and students could look at them when they had free time or reading time.

 They loved them.  

Then I turned on the projector and showed them different kinds of optical illusions.  They really enjoyed the old lady vs. young lady one... mostly because I had forgotten how to find the young lady (we never figured it out that class so one boy went home, printed off a picture of it, and came back to school the next day to show me how to see it).

cup/profile illusion

old/young lady illusion

How many feet does the elephant have?

Then we just did a quick google image search for Escher together and the students picked different pictures they wanted me to click on to see larger.

By now they were long done their snack and ready to get into an art project.  I started by getting them to take out a pencil, ruler, and passed out a plain white piece of paper.

I pulled up this website on the projector and for the most part we simply followed along with what it said and my amazing rendition of the drawing on the board.

STEP 1:

Put a small dot on your page.  Anywhere on your page.

STEP 2:

Make an even number of straight lines coming out of this dot (they used their ruler) to help with this most of them took the suggestion to just draw one long line that would pass through the dot... you are guaranteed an even number of lines this way.  I told them not to make more than 14 lines total (the more lines you have the more work it will be later on).

I drew my version of this nice and big on the board

STEP 3:

To help students with this next part I labelled my sections on the board (in this example I had 8 sections). I told them to draw "happy faces" on all the odd sections (every other section in their drawing) and showed them what I meant by this (basically a curved line).  I walked around the room to make sure everyone was skipping a section and doing this correctly which was when I noticed that one of my students actually drew happy faces in every other section.  Whoops.

STEP 4:

On the even sections they did frowning faces (or curved lines going the opposite way).  I guess the frowning faces vs happy faces only works if you rotate your paper while you are drawing... my students were rotating their paper.

STEP 5:

Pick your colours!

I pulled up a picture of a colour wheel on the projector and we talked about complimentary colours (if you don't know complimentary colours are those that are on opposite sides of the colour wheel).  To make things easy we said that blue was opposite orange, purple was opposite yellow, and green was opposite red.  Once they picked one colour the other colour they would use would be easy.. just look to the other side of the wheel.  They took out these colours in markers and ones that matched their markers in pencil crayons.

STEP 6:

Start colouring!

Every other section would be the same colour (so in my this examples case all odd sections would be blue and even sections would be orange.  THEN you only colour every other part in that section.  I went back to my huge example on the board to demonstrate what I meant.  Most got it... some got a little confused.  A lot of my students dabbed a little colour on each part they needed to colour so they wouldn't get confused.

This was pretty well how far we got the first day but with the magic of the blog I'll just continue acting like we were super colourers and were able to get the entire lesson done in one day and not 4 (or more).  

STEP 7:

Once they finished colouring I had them use their pencil crayons to do some shading between each coloured part.  Just because I thought it might look better (and I also read it on the linked page)

STEP 8:

I gave them an index card and told them to write on it what they thought it looked like. I told them to trim their cards afterwards (most forgot about that though) and then glue it on their picture somewhere that it wouldn't be in the way.

Voila!  We were done!