September 21, 2010

Texture!





I am so happy I almost cried! One of my art classes was learning about primary colors with another art teacher that they see once a week. She asked what are the primary colors? cue music. . . dum dum dummm. They answered RED, YELLOW, then she asked what comes next, meaning what color, and one kid said. . . "the secondary colors!" Success! In classes of 30-40 almost all of them are beginning to understand color theory.

On to TEXTURE! My Kindergarten and first graders are learning vocabulary to describe textures. 
Check out the words that my first grade bilingual class came up with! I'm hoping we can USE them! 

Soft, furry, fuzzy, bumpy, lumpy, scratchy, rough, spikey, smooth, slimy

One way I got bilingual students to really think about textures is
MY TEXTURE BOX! I have a box filled with sandpaper, shells, feathers, burlap, etc. To introduce my mysterious box I looked inside the box and said "what if I had a little bunny in the texture box how would it feel?" They all said soft. I helped them use other words for soft like furry and fuzzy. I dramatically peeked in the box and said "NOPE! No bunnies in here. I wouldn't put a bunny in a box!" Then I say "but WORMS! How would worms feel if they were in the texture box?" At this point all of their jaws dropped! If you've never seen 33 first graders speechless it is a once in a lifetime event! They really thought there were worms in the box. So of course I put my hand in and made a face pretending to feel the worms. The kids said "Slimy! Squishy!" "Would anyone like to feel inside the box?" You can imagine everyone sat there looking in disbelief at their crazy teacher. One boy's hand shot up daringly. He reluctantly felt in the box "there's no worms in here!" He pulled out a shell. How does it feel? . . .The lesson was very entertaining but after a half hour of this we were ready to create!

Students wrote the words on the back of their paper and made texture rubbings at their table. Eight students at a time got to come up to the leaf texture table. 

First I put leaves on the table.

Covered them with a roll of white paper.

Students made leaf texture rubbings and signed their leaf. 

I got the idea of doing this as a group project from another blog. Now I can't find where! If it was your idea please let me know!

5 comments:

Mrs. Hahn said...

Love the texture box! I have a similar thing but I need to repair them before I use them this year. They have been touched one to many times by little hands.

Hey, thanks for the comment on the Day of the Dead on my blog. I will use the comment about 'leaning about what other celebrate'. I'm sure I will have a comment or two. It's the first time I've done Day or the Dead. Thanks for dropping by:)

Marcia Beckett said...

I like that large leaf rubbing idea!

polwig said...

LOVE leaf rubbings, I think they are so cool and so beautiful... I also love the mistery box questions... FUN

barb said...

That may have been my blog, Erica. I love your texture box idea. We came back to our big rubbings this week to print two more ways. We painted off the edges of leaves to make a print, then flipped the leaf over and pressed to make a print. I cut the big sheets up and we'll be making rubber band sketch books next week. They will make a very pretty cover.

Unknown said...

It was you Barb! Check out http://barbarasthoughtoftheday.blogspot.com/

It was a really successful idea such a with the kids!