Picture Clues or Clue Pictures?

I take LOTS of photos while I'm teaching. I take photos of kiddos to share with them (and eventually their parents), I take photos of evidence of learning (often for the kiddos to print and glue in their workbooks), I take photos of processes we're working on, I take photos of assessment products (to grade later at home, or just to have on hand later), I take photos of things I find funny, I take photos of books I want to remember, I take... Well, you get the picture. (Ha! No pun intended, honestly!)

The upshot is that I have a BUCKETLOAD of photos that aren't necessarily all 'keepers'. I need to develop a system for sorting them quickly, but until then I'll continue using Evernote (when I remember) or just making folders (also when I remember and have time). All of this is my way of saying that today whilst going through some photos I found some photos from a lesson that was great fun and full of fantastic discussions. (My husband would tell you that me taking a long time to get to the point and visiting various other points along the way is NOT unusual. Meh. I'm cool with it, I know when I need to rein it in.)

So here they are anyway.

I used this lesson with the same Reception group you may remember from my second space adventure. We'd been talking about using clues in pictures to help us understand a story so I decided to give them part of a picture and let them tell the story by making the rest of of the picture. I had a range of animal images with more or less detail and directed children accordingly. I was fortunate enough to have SSO classroom support during this lesson and so we were able to offer quite individualised support to our students with special needs. The results were all fantastic... Here are three.

I love that this fish was leading the rest
 of his school to school. 

This giraffe was eating and swimming. Very clever!

It was cloudy,  so this lion was looking
at the sky to see if was going to rain.

Here is the original pinterest post that inspired this lesson. (Yep, another pinterest inspired lesson. Sense a theme developing?)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities
Standard 1.6 Strategies to support full participation of students with disability.
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies  

Alphabet posters

I had a contract earlier this year with, as I mentioned last time, a group of wonderful 5 year old people. I walked into this class with no background knowledge other than 'their regular teacher was away on a cruise and the teacher originally booked to cover this period had a family tragedy and was, at the last minute, unable to take the class'. I had all of one day to prepare so our first day together was a whirlwind of formative assessment couched as getting to know you activities.

I'll admit that I found my first day in this class terrifying! Aside from walking in with only generic plans (and feeling woefully under-prepared), these children had already experienced a week of a relief teacher and come from a community that doesn't welcome strangers particularly readily.  Let's just say that they didn't share my enthusiasm for getting to know each other. And why should they? They already knew each other!

That being said, we pretty quickly settled into a routine of morning literacy and numeracy blocks.  We ran explicit class discussions followed by 5-6 work stations through which the children moved.  Several mornings each week I was incredibly lucky enough to have in-class support for the two children with special needs. This allowed me to work with small groups in 'guided reading' type activities. (In as much as guided reading is possible with children who are still in the early days of letter/word recognition.)

One of all of our favourite literacy stations was creating alphabet posters. We made a few varieties ranging from cutting jumbled letters and pasting them into order, to a space themed poster (letters were written on stars and planets) during our space week.

Everyone's favourite poster was inspired by a pin that you can see here. (What a surprise that I found inspiration on Pinterest!!!) It was basically a grid with each 'hole' containing a letter written in a different colour crayon and painted with a water colour wash.

 It's not a particularly difficult process but it does take lots of patience because there are a few steps.

1. Draw the grid. (I draw one before class and photocopied it because I know myself well enough to admit that I simply do NOT have the patience to have helped every child with theirs individually, and also to admit that I'm a perfectionist and wanted these to have reasonably regular grids.)
2. Write the letters in each hole. We wrote ours in pencil first and then traced over with crayon but if you're brave confident enough you could go straight to crayon.
3. Trace over the grid lines with crayon. (I had to help some of my little guys with this because drawing along the edge of a ruler actually requires quite some fine motor control.)
4. Carefully paint each grid hole with different coloured watercolour paint. If you're a perfectionist (like me... Are you starting to sense that this was not the best project choice for me?) then it's best to walk away at this point because if you're working with 5 year olds they WILL use too much water/paint and the colours WILL mix. I worked REALLY hard to keep smiling and calmly repeat "not too much water, wipe your brush on the edge" over and over and over and over... In the end the children did a marvellous job and I was able to breathe easily again.

 When I photocopied the grids I also trimmed the pages a little so that I could mount them on coloured paper more easily. We thought they looked great.

What's your favourite alphabet art activity?


(Art Projects for Kids is the blog where this project was originally published and is quite brilliant, but I suggest you make a cup of tea and pull up a comfy chair because it's a treasure trove so you'll want to settle in for an afternoon of oohing and ahhing!)