And the T-shirt Finalists Are...

As you know, the Perkins School is having t-shirts made as a way to raise money for well needed art supplies.  All the kids who wanted to, made a piece of art that could possibly be put on the t-shirts.  If you go back to our posts from last week, you can read all about it.

Rightside Shirts has selected nine designs for us to vote on.  The top three will be offered for sale with the profits being donated for next year's art supplies.

HERE ARE THE FINALISTS...

If you can't get a good look at them from this perspective, a couple of our kids also offered to present them to you.

Start the debates.  Think about your favorites.  The vote for the winners will be tomorrow!!!

We Love Those Teachers!!!

You may not have known, but last week was Teacher Appreciation Week.  Luckily Ms. Correa and the Parents Council for the Perkins School were very aware of the occasion.  

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Thanks to them, Friday was the...
 

Teachers' Luau! 

There was great food. Many different choices.  No poi, though; it's very hard to find in South Boston or probably any part of Boston.

It was a nice time to sit and relax and enjoy each others' company.  Let alone, feel appreciated.

Even the Perkins' author-in-residence and blog master.

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

Our last post showed you some of the great designs Perkins kids created for our t-shirt art supply fundraising project.  Of course, there were many, many more, but we couldn't put them all on the blog.  Admiring them would take up your entire day.

We did, however, want to give today's space to some artwork devoted to a special subject.  Several students decided to use their drawings to reflect upon a subject that has been on all of our minds--sad thoughts, but also a celebration of our friends, families and city.  

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ART IS...

 Art is...fun.  inspiring.  creative.  fundraising??

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The Perkins School has embarked on a project with Rightside Shirts.  This young nonprofit company raises money for youth art education by selling t-shirts designed by students.  One hundred percent (that's right, 100%) of the profits are given back to the school to fund art programs and supplies. 

The whole process starts with all our kids drawing or painting or sketching anything they want to.  Here are just a few examples of our kids' contributions.

Jeff and Dylan, the co-founders of Rightside, come to collect the art.  Then they have a hard job as well.  They select five to ten drawings from all these masterpieces as possible candidates for the three(?) to be printed on the t-shirts.  

Normally they would just pick those three themselves.  

We, however, do things the Perkins Way.  

We taught our kindergarteners the basics of democracy by having them vote to name the crane that helped build Phase One of Old Colony.  We reinforced the lesson for Ms. Murphy's second graders when they learned how to campaign, vote, and win or lose gracefully while deciding their class pet.  Now, Leo the leopard gecko is beloved by all.

This time we will have a school-wide election.  We will vote to select which designs will appear on our t-shirts.  Democracy at work.

 Once the t-shirts are made, Perkins kids and our community will be able to buy them for $14, with the profits of that sale feeding our budget for next year's art supplies.

Jeff and Dylan will also decide if one of those designs will go onto the Rightside web site (www.rightsideshirts.org) to be sold to the world!  Again those profits would come back to the Perkins to fund art.

What's going to happen?

Which designs will be voted on?

Stay tuned.

Inch by Inch

The Garden Song starts with the chorus: 
"Inch by inch, row by row,
Gonna make this garden grow."

Learning works much the same way.  A new idea or lesson or observation builds upon the last, then another and another.  That's how we learn and acquire knowledge.  Ironically the way Ms. Hicks' first grade class applied this type of learning has been with plants and gardens.

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First they explored their senses.  One thing they thought about is how they can use all their senses to learn about something.

Smelling beautiful scents and seeing bright colors is a plus, especially when your next science unit is about plants.  Of course, it's also important to learn how plants get the energy and nutrients they need to grow.

The kids' senses came into play again as their unit moved to learning about water and watched different ways that it moves.  Grownups might think of these processes as the hydrologic cycle and osmosis; those words are fine, too.

Then it was time to put all these ideas and lessons together and into action--a test, an experiment.  The kids put one group of white flowers into a cup of regular water just to see what would happen to the flowers normally (that's called a control group).  They put other white flowers into cups of water tinted by food coloring. WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

  

THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN!

The kids wrote up their observations.  After all, that's what scientists do.    

Plants AND Language Skills Grow in Spring

It's spring and many Perkins kids are studying units about plants, the earth, water and how things grow.  Imagine trying to understand all these new subjects when you have to learn the words that describe them at the same time.  That's what's going on in Ms. Enos's class of English language learners.  Many of these kids are newcomers to our country and to English.  So there's a lot of learning going on.

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Here are some of the new vocabulary words they must learn to even start their units.

 

Sometimes it's easiest to connect a word to a picture.

A simple sentence in English often starts with the subject (I, in this case), follows with a verb or two (can pick), an article (the), and noun (carrot).  It seems simple when you grow up with this pattern.  

Most languages have different forms of every verb and you must learn which one is used with which subject.  Some languages often don't bother with the subject because they just change the verb.  Still other languages think of nouns as feminine or masculine and you must know which they are to put the feminine version of "the" or "an" in front of them.  

Sounds hard, doesn't it?  Any language is hard when you don't know its rules (or its words!).

Luckily the English language learners at the Perkins have plants to look at as they study how things grow.

 

They also have Ms. Enos to help them study English and watch their skills grow.

I Know a Place To Go...

Last month we reported on the need for our students, everybody actually, to know how to calm down and focus.  As we mentioned, it sometimes takes practice finding a quiet place inside ourselves.  One way to practice is to have a quiet place out in the world, where you can go to breathe deep. This has been especially true around Boston recently.

Some of our second graders wrote about the quiet, calm places they can go and relax.  

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