Communities

The classrooms at my school are organized into pods. In my pod, we have grades 1-3. Kindergarten is in another pod, but also moves to ours for some activities. Within our pod, we have a rotation of yearly themes. This year, our theme of focus is community. Each classroom can take that focus in any direction they choose. My class has begun by studying the different types of communities: urban, suburban, and rural. We have been creating representations of the different types of communities using different art methods. 

For our Suburban art activity, each student created trees in green and also fall colors. Each student also created a house. Afterwards, we rolled out a long piece of paper and each student claimed a space. Their job was to turn the individual houses into a community project that showed a suburban neighborhood. They had to place their houses and trees in their space and could add grass, a road, clouds, etc. I am loving how it turned out overall...despite that fact that we ended up with three suns....live and learn. Next time I do this project, we will discuss ways to be more successful and only include one sun. 

For the rural area, we did a directed drawing of hills. On each hill, students were to create a pattern of stripes, swirls, circles, or whatever their heart decided. Once the landscape was done, we added fences, a farm, and animals on top of the hills. We simply colored these with crayons. We focus a lot on quality of work at our school and because of that, we will be redoing some of our farm pictures to up that quality. It's a process.

Our final community is the urban city. We looked at some pictures of big cities. We talked about the shapes we saw. We discussed the different types of buildings. Then we drew our own cities. Afterward, we got out the watercolor paints and the details came alive. I am loving these. Most of my friends did an amazing job!

Next week, I hope to wrap all of our community learning up and move on to something new.