Special Edition
January 10, 2001
OK, here's what everyone's been asking for, a somewhat abbreviated edition of InMyRoom to fill folks in on January activities. I've been receiving as many as 50 letters per day asking me if I'm EVER going to update the website and asking me to please put my January quilt online, along with the Good Morning song and pocket charts.
I've also received some very flattering notes from teachers around the world, telling me how much they've learned from KinderKorner -- the Listserv as well as the Website -- and also enquiring after my health and well-being and hoping that all is well :o) Thanks to everyone who took the time to write ... next time I have a lengthy delay between updates, I'll be sure to put something on the website explaining my absence and giving an approximate date that the new photos will be online.
The short-and-sweet explanation is that I was sick the first week or so of Winter break, and then I got incredibly busy with the holidays, family commitments, a trip to the coast, and getting the New Year off to a good start at school.
Sunset in Pismo Beach, California ~ Christmas Week 2000
Once I get all the backlogged stuff online, I should be back on my normal weekly update schedule. I have more than 200 digital photos to edit and sort, and am working on the mid-December page (better late than never) as well as my Let It Snow unit and the Jan Brett Author Study, so please bear with me while I get everything done ... your patience is greatly appreciated!
I should also mention that there won't be a weekend update photo page this week, as I'll be at the California Kindergarten Association conference in San Francisco. I hope to have some great things to share with you the following weekend, so be sure to check back.
If you're attending the conference and would like to say hello, you can look for me at lunchtime outside the student union building on the east side, soaking up the sunshine if there happens to be any. I'll be having lunch on the planter benches there on both Saturday and Sunday, so look for the enthusiastic lady with the red hair and sunglasses.
You can also look for me at Kaye Espinosa's TLC booth (be sure to stop by and say hello to Kaye and tell her how much you enjoy seeing her projects on my website!) in the exhibitor's area, or in the conference headquarters at the end of each afternoon, turning in materials and session evaluations.
Have a great week!
~ Victoria
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We're still in the midst of my G is for Gingerbread unit, and I made a large Gingerbread House for my Thematic Wall. I made and overhead transparency of a nice blackline Gingerbread House I had in my files, projected it onto white butcher paper, traced it in pencil, then colored the whole thing with markers. It needs to be laminated for durability, but I went ahead and stuck it up on the wall because I was running behind ... I'll laminate it after I take it down at the end of the month.
This is much larger
than it looks here all by itself,
as you can tell
from the whole wall picture.
In retrospect, I wish I'd made the much simpler Gingerbread House from the cover of the Vicki Witcher book I'm using this month, it would have saved me several hours of coloring time, and would have related well to the book the kids are working with all month. Hindsight is a wonderful thing :o)
Snowflakes
We got a lot of experience cutting snowflakes last week. We practiced making them from photocopy paper, coffee filters (easy for small hands to cut), and paper lace doilies. All of the ones you see above were made by the KinderKids, with the exception of 2 samples I cut while showing them how to do it ... didn't they do a terrific job?
I Am A Snowman
The sun was shining
through the window when I took this :o)
January Quilt Patches
I had a bit of trouble deciding which quilt squares to make this month. I knew I wanted to make a snowman patch, and I've made several different types in previous years. My favorite one had a paper snowflake for the body, a construction paper square-cut-into-a-circle for the head, and a free form hat.
These snowmen patches were made by my first grade class in January 1999. The blue background patches are 9" x 9". After the snowmen were glued in place and decorated, we spattered the squares with white paint to look like snow.
I laminated the patches for durability, and took them to the 1999 CKA Conference, where I was taking a quilting workshop. The final quilt was assembled by attaching the patches to white butcher paper with double-sided tape, and then using green masking tape to make sashing between the patches and around the perimeter.
The photos are kind of fuzzy and dark. I taped the quilt to the bookshelves in my family room a few minutes ago to take the pictures, and the overhead light caused a lot of glare. Because the quilt is laminated, I wasn't able to use a flash. You can see how I left a "border" of white butcher paper visible around each patch, to contrast with the dark blue background.
The fully assembled
quilt.
This Year's Patches ~ Snowmen & Snowflakes
I decided to do something slighly different this year, as I was given a large supply of paper lace doilies a few weeks ago. The background patches are 9" x 9" and the construction paper squares -- to make the rounded heads -- were 2 1/2" x 2 1/2". I gave the KinderKids paper scraps to cut into colorful hats.
I wanted to make a red and blue quilt, so I cut red 9" x 9" squares to use as the background for another snowflake patch. I decided the snowflakes wouldn't look too great on red, so I cut 7" x 7" blue squares to build the snowflakes on. This picture shows the bare blue squares mounted on the red squares, to see how it would look with the red background.
This
was really a design-it-as-you-go project :o) I decided to put a 6"
wide black border around the entire quilt, with 6" square blue patches
at the corners. This picture shows how the plain red background patches
look, versus the smaller blue-on-red patches. We're still in the
process of making mittens and gingerbread kids to decorate the border ...
I'll add a copy of the fully finished quilt when we finally get them up.
We made our snowflake patches from pattern block shapes cut on the Ellison machine. I glued a hexagon in the middle of each patch, and explained that real snowflakes have six points or spokes. I let the KinderKids choose the shapes they wanted to use to build their patch, stressing pattern and symmetry. Almost everyone made a six-spoked patch, and their designs were wonderful.
Our almost-ready quilt on my main teaching wall, behind the boxes that hold three Literacy Centers: Big Books, ABC Big Books, and Song & Poetry Cards. I've started putting the mittens on the quilt (they had to make matching pairs), and I like the way the border frames the quilt and gives it a nice, finished look. The empty red patch "belongs" to a child who's been absent for several days.
Snowman Cut & Paste
This is an activity I do every year, using blackline masters for a snowman and various clothing for dressing him. It's a good cut-and-paste activity for guaging progress in fine motor skills (coloring, cutting, assembling). I let the children dictate two or three sentences about their snowman and add them to the bottom of their page. In two or three weeks, I'll take these down, laminate them, and make them into a Big Book for our classroom library.
