Beautiful Things - Spring Bulbs

Morning Warm-up: 15 minutes

Brainstorm descriptive words for the daffodils and hyacinths using the senses of touch, smell and sight.

How does it feel?

soft, flat, squishy, smooth

How does it smell?

nice, fresh, fragrant, strong, sweet

What do you see?

purple, yellow, ivory, green stems, jar, water

Hug a Tree! or Just Paint One for Earth Day!

Concentration and creativity joined hands this Earth Day as students tried their hand at painting trees inspired by the late Emily Carr. My peer, B.B., guided the learners through Emily Carr images and noted how the painted lines showed movement. She found the idea for this project here: http://www.kinderart.com/arthistory/emilycarr.shtml.

The learners did 'air writing' of the movement, just tracing the shapes and lines in the air. Then the students got to it.

What really amazed me were the different interpretations of what a tree is.

 We then made a tree of all the trees.

It was interesting to see how people from different areas of world painted different styles of trees. The 'tree' in their mind was certainly not from the same corpus as Emily Carr's! What beautiful designs!

Amazingly, at our local art gallery an Emily Carr exhibit was showing at this time. This show was also featured in the local newspaper. A few teachers and a few students ventured out after school hours (during the free hours at the gallery) to visit the exhibit and experience Carr's art work in a new environment.  

Two of my colleagues, B.B. and A.B., entered this project into the TESL Ontario ESL Week Contest and won first place in the Photo/Collage Category! Here is a link to their outstanding work: http://www.teslontario.net/sites/default/files/webform/eslweek_instructors/Immigrant%20Women%27s%20Centre.jpg

Follow up activities can be found here:

Best of the Reader: Aboriginal People (graded stories of adults): http://www.bestofthereader.ca/Ebooks/Canada%27s_Aboriginal_People.pdf

Heritage Minutes: https://www.historica-dominion.ca/content/heritage-minutes/emily-carr

Vancouver Art Gallery Educational Resources (may need to be adapted): http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/expositions-exhibitions/emily_carr/en/index.php 

Teaching ESL Literacy Foundation and Phase I Webinar

Check out my Teaching ESL Literacy Foundation and Phase I Webinar posted in Tutela.ca at http://tutela.ca/ViewContentItem?itemId=5206. Tutela is a "National Online Repository and Community of Practice". Free membership is required, but it is a wonderful resource for all ESL teachers. I fully recommend it!