This week, the first grade studied the letters Y and Z.
For the letter Y, the students drew a picture of a girl standing behind a yew tree with Y-shaped twigs. In the picture are also a few yarrow plants with a Y-shaped growth pattern. This was the first picture in which we used more detail in our drawing than usual. The students also listened to All the Way to Lhasa, A Tale of Tibet, a story about persistence. In All the Way to Lhasa, a boy travels alone to Lhasa with his yak. He travels over steep slopes, crosses a waterfall on a narrow bridge, through wind and snow, until he finally arrives at Lhasa, all by putting one foot in front of the other.
For the letter Z, the students had fun making the buzzing sound of Z while wielding imaginary swords in a zig-zag motion through the air and running zig-zag lines. The students listened to the story of The Golden Zebra in which a Zulu king sends his servants to the king of Zanzibar with a golden zebra as a peace offering. On our main lesson page, we drew a picture of Zeus, throwing his zig-zag shaped lightning bolts down to earth.
In watercolor painting, the students used the colors red, blue, and yellow to paint. They worked slowly and gave the colors time to spread on the paper. Deliberately pacing themselves made the students aware of how dynamic the watercolor behaves on the wet paper and how different colors merge when they run together. In form drawing, the class practiced drawing parallel lines. On Monday, they learned from the second-grade students how to fold a piece of paper to make a book with eight pages. This spurred their creativity. The students could not stop making books, writing stories, and illustrating them in their free time throughout the whole week. Also, two of our students finished their knitted cat. On Thursday, the class celebrated Lincoln’s birthday. We ended the week on Friday afternoon by soaking up the sun and playing in the forest.
Our students are very active at The Garden School. Some types of face masks tend to slip out of place easier than others. Please check the fit of your child’s face masks and consider using face masks with adjustable earloops for proper fit.
