Week 7: Visitors from the Bug Museum!

Hello Parents and Students!

This week, we had two graduate students from the Entomology Department come to our classroom. The Bug Experts brought in live and preserved bugs from the museum, which was a really great experience for both our students and the teachers.  Students were able to hold different bugs including a cockroach, different stick bugs, beetles (looked like small worms!) and a tarantula. Our students had a lot of previous knowledge about these different bugs and we were very impressed with some of the answers they were able to come up with!  Overall, we hope that our students had a great time with the our visitors today.

After our visitors left, we broke into small groups where students were able to pick which learning center they wanted to work at.  We had a collaborative drawing table, where students were able to reflect on the bug visitors and draw on a large paper that stretched out over 3 tables.  We had a sculpture table, where students were able to experience with clay and create their own bug.  Finally, we repeated a learning center where students were able to pick random words out of a bucket and create a sentence with the words they had chosen.  Following their sentence, students created an image to relate to their sentence.

We had a wonderful week with our students! We have only one more class and are looking forward to it!! See you next week!

-Ally and Jillian

Character Buildling and Illustration

Hi again!  Saturday School is flying by, as we only have 2 more classes left in this semester.  This week, we were once again amazed by our students creativity and wonderful story telling.  For this class, we introduced the idea of story telling and character building by creating images with words.   We focused on learning centers again, where we had three different projects going on in the classroom.  At the first table, students were able to pick random words out of a bucket and create a sentence and drawing an image that coincides with the words.  At the second table, students were able to use different stencils to create their own character, with the use of other objects such as sequence or pipe cleaners.  At the third table, students created a story with an accordion-style book.  They learned the sequence of a story, including the beginning, middle, and end.  They also learned about conflict, or the problem in the story to make it more interesting.   Students came up with wonderful stories and images today!  Take a look at what they created.

Don't forget!  The bug experts from the Entomology Department will be coming to our class this week!  (If you missed it, we are no longer going to the bug museum as the department decided last week that they are renovating the building, so they are coming to us instead!) 

-Allison & Jillian