Busy, Busy Busy! Art, Banjara and... String Theory?

Today was another lovely day with the girls! We started off by going outside and walking all around the school, collecting some samples from the garden for observation drawings. We continued our morning doing some lovely art; they experienced their very first gesture drawing session, a series of fast-paced, overlapping (and messy) charcoal drawings.

The girls had fun exploring this new medium. At first, they were concerned about crushing the charcoal, but I soon dissuaded their fears by showing them how fun it is to crush the charcoal and smear with our fingers! Charcoal is one of my very favourites, and I think the girls started warming up to it on our second drawing. This portion of the lesson focused on our first element of arts -- space! They learned about negative and positive space, and how looking at the negative space is so useful when drawing the positive space. They were encouraged to draw big, and fill the page with their charcoal. Our two blocks of art flew by!

During our Language Arts block, I exposed them to better presentation techniques -- less words on the slide, more pictures, and knowing your material through memorization, in order to give a more confident presentation. My sample presentation was on a nomadic people called Banjara, who originated from Romania and now have spread out throughout the whole Indian subcontinent.

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The way they adapt and change, evolving depending on the place they occupy, makes them a very global people, which ties in well with our focus on exploring, accepting and appreciating world differences this year. I brought some authentic Banjara trinkets and played a dance video, which the girls enjoyed greatly. Some of the girls were eager to try on the jewelry, so I took photos of them.

Finally, we moved forward from input and output machines and straight into grid coordinates... in a very unusual way! Unfortunately I did not take any pictures (I was too engaged!!!), but you should ask the girls about our string exercise (ha ha, not really string theory, but it was "theory" and it used "strings"!!!)

Following our fun string exercise, the girls had a better understanding of coordinates, laying a reasonably strong foundation to build upon.