Month / May 2017

by arTree

Cards for Moms

Making gifts for moms has become a ‘thing’ in my classroom now.

We make gifts for them almost every day. Kids want to make pictures for their moms. They want to pick flowers for them. They want to wrap pieces of papers as presents for them (the more of them there are and the more colorful they are the better, obviously).

I scored a box of old (yet amazing) greeting cards at a garage sale and when the boys found them in our tinkering space, they were amazed. They immediately wanted to use them to make cards for their moms. True, some of them were wedding congratulations, Christmas cards, Valentine’s Day cards… but when the kids combined them together, glued some gems on top and wrote a personal message inside, I think nobody minded.

by arTree

Building a House

Yesterday the kids decided that my house burned down and I need a new one. What followed was amazing.

They started talking about what my house needs and of course, since they are four boys, the main focus was bathrooms. As of now, my new house has 18 of them (one of them being inside of a dump truck to make it easier). But that’s not all. I now have ‘pool noodle electricity’ installed throughout my mansion, along with a hose so that my house does not burn again… I have three beds, an attached restaurant and a lot of things to play with, including a fish and a monster. I have a high-tech security system that will scare all bad guys away and I have a very flexible roof that can be removed as needed. Honestly – what more can I wish for?

From a professional point of view – they worked on it for two hours, cooperated, helped each other, planned and estimated how what will support the weight of the logs… they measured and counted how many items they used. They wrote messages around the house practicing their literacy skills. They were so engaged, it was truly inspiring.