After all of our hard work with our "Not a Box" genius hour, we were so excited to share all that we had learned and accomplished. We did some reflecting and writing about our project...both on our own and as a group.
One of the questions we answered as a group was -- "How does your project make the world 'awesomer'?" Here are some of our answers...
-using our imaginations to help people have fun
-travel to new and unknown lands
-playing with it
-it's cool and fun
-by helping people
-for the world to be funner
-showing the world foster homes
-by letting us play
One of the other questions was about what was hard for us. Many of us agreed that "collaboration" was so hard! To fix this, we thought we could make sure we listened, shared ideas and worked together.
During our student led conferences, we shared our projects with our parents. We also got the chance to share with other students. Our teacher invited kindergarten to grade 4 classes to come and see our projects last week. It was very overwhelming to have so many kids to talk to at the same time! We explained our projects and they asked us some great questions.
Here are some pictures from our "not a box genius hour" showcase with the students...
This is the picture our teacher has shown us all week as her desktop background:
Photo Credit: Princess and the Rock
We started out this week's genius hour by listening to the story "Simon and His Boxes" by Gilles Tibo.
In the story, Simon wants to build houses for animals. But the animals don't want to live in the homes he creates for them. So, he finds something else to do with the boxes. It was interesting to see Simon construct things as well as see the details that he added.
Reading this story helped us to think about more possibilies of what we could do with our "Not a Box" projects. We were excited to hear that today we would get to plan our projects!
The first step was for each of us to spend some time thinking, drawing and writing about what we would like to create.
After spending some time planning on our own, it was time to get together with our group. Most of us are in groups of 3, but there are a couple groups of 4. We each shared our own ideas with our group and then put our heads together to come up with our group idea. This proved to be quite hard, since each of us already had an idea of what we wanted to do individually. Many of our groups talked about trying to use everyone's ideas as part of the group plan, but then we found out that we were only allowed to create one project, not 3 separate ones.
After more discussion, we worked towards agreeing on a project and then planning it out by writing about what we will be creating, what materials we will need and what our creation's purpose or job will be.
Today was hard work (harder than we thought it would be), but we're excited to be moving forward!
So we started our genius hour by moving to the art room, sitting in groups of 4 and talking about what we thought this picture was trying to tell us. Many of us figured it had something to do with teamwork, being creative and how 4 people could work together to create something. We were also asked to try and give one word that described this picture. We needed a few clues before finally coming up with the word "collaboration".
We then watched this video about students and teachers collaborating.
Next, we heard about "collaborative circle paintings". Some of the grade 2 classes and kindergarten classes have done these and they are on display around our school. We watched this video of a grade 3/4 class doing collaborative circle paintings:
Since our theme is "not a box", we got to try this kind of painting but instead of circles, we could only draw boxes--squares and rectangles. Here you can see our work at the beginning of the project:
Every student had 2 paint colors to work with. As we worked, we listened to music. Each time a song ended, we had to pass our two paint colors to the person to the right. Then we had another few minutes to paint again, using our two new colors. We continued this way until we had our original paint colors back.
Then, after each song, we had to change spots. This got interesting, because now we had to work on a space that someone else had started on. Some of us did not really like this part because someone else was changing what we had started. It also got a little more tricky as our paper filled up -- where would we paint? We had to be brave and go over top of other people's work.
In this video, you can see us working near the end of the project:
After we were done, we spent some time thinking about and discussing this project. The first question we had to answer was -- What one word would you use to describe your completed painting? Our answers included: awesome, wow, messy, soggy, boxtastic, beautiful, extraordinary, amazing, colorful, worst, creative, horrifying, ozmazing, unique, genius, boxome, crazy, ripped, cool.
The other question we had to answer was -- How did you feel during the process? Did it change during different parts? Here are some of our thoughts...
-- Breanna: creative all through the process
-- Taya: not that good when we changed spots
-- Evan: rollercoaster the whole way through
-- Makayla: calm the whole way through
-- Landon: disappointed because I wanted to do pirates
-- Sam: mad and grumpy when we changed spots
-- Kade: nervous because I was not sure what was going to happen and if I could do it
-- Jaxson: mad because I didn't get to use a thin brush
-- Tristan: a little sad because some people didn't like me going over their stuff
Now what are we going to do with our completed masterpieces? That's yet to be decided.
We were wondering...
Have you ever done a collaborative painting before?
Have you ever collaborated on a different kind of project?
