Garden Mural- RES

You may already know that first grade artists here at RES are working on scientific drawing.  We began with our shoes and then moved onto leaves, incorporating lots of formative assessment in the style of peer feedback.

Last week we read Janet Stevens' book Tops and Bottoms to help us think about how plants have many parts.  If you haven't read it before, KnowWatchLearn has it in video format, which we used in the classroom to see the illustrations larger. The story is hilarious, as the hare outwits the lazy bear into selecting the inedible portions of each crop, and is a great introduction into plant parts.

Each students chose a vegetable. We began with a basic discussion of whether we eat the tops or bottoms of each vegetable.

Tops of vegetables

Bottoms of same vegetables as above

We then discussed how those "tops" and "bottoms" have other more specific names, such as leaves, stems, fruits, flowers, tubers, roots, bulbs, and seeds. Each student illustrated their vegetable in its entirety and wrote about what parts we eat, what parts they like, and some even chose to describe what the vegetable looks like. Special attention was given to leaf shapes and mixing shades of greens.

"Beets are red and green.  We eat the bottom."

 Look at that beet!  This student worked very carefully to mix just the right red, and really focused on the shapes of the leaves, and the way that the stems cluster together so tightly at the bottom.

"We eat the root of the carrot."

All of these are being put together into one big garden.

"I eat the bulb of the onion."

The accurate overlap of the leaves as they grow out of this onion bulb really astounded me- this is a first grade artist!

In-progress garden mural

This morning the Kindergarteners walked by on their way to drop off vegetables in the RES kitchen for the Stone Soup they are making with the Farm-to-School program.  They stopped to check out the work of the first graders, and it was a wonderful opportunity to make some subject area connections between the grades.

The soup is simmering away, and the hallway now not only looks beautiful, but smells amazing as well!

Is that a QR code on that bulletin board display?  It sure is! Now when I display student work in the hallway, I link right to this blog with a QR code to let visitors get more information about artwork.