Week 4 of My Second Placement

Last week was not a typical one due to Veterans Day and a visiting author. The schools I went to growing up are in New York, and we would always have Veterans Day off, but PA schools still have school.  During the 1st period of that day, the entire school had an assembly.  The music teacher taught each grade level a patriotic song that they performed to the school.

The next day we had at visiting author come to the school named Peter Catalanotto.  He is an artist who began illustrating other children’s books then eventually and currently hes is also writting his own books. I was impressed with how well Peter kept the students attention, each assembly was about an hour long.  I watched each of these assemblies and enjoyed them all.  They were each different as he modified the content for the age level of the students.  The children learned how to “brainstorm,” to draw/write down all and any of your ideas before creating a story. He discussed the components of a story, how to make a story board and a dummy book.  He talked about how he would take something real like a pet or a remembered experience and use that as a starting point of a book. From the real you can ask “what if” to create a story about something you desire.  If you are interested in having him speak at your school, all of the information you’d need is at this website. You can buy his books on Amazon.

Here’s some “Op Art” that I made for a lesson.  The next step will be to weave them into more paper.

I’m excited to see my student’s artwork becoming closer to completion. Within the next couple of weeks the surreal mixed media paintings and the 5th graders books should be finished. I will be taking a lot of pictures them next week to put in my next post.

~ by florriebarnett on November 15, 2008.