Up and Down, Up and Down, Liiiiitle Bitty.

January 11, 2014--

Like I said in my last posting, I am learning as I go from these kiddos.  It's so much fun.
On Thursday, I had a class of 3rd graders, who were so adorable.  I am explaining the coloring portion of the project we were working on and showing them how I wanted it done.  This one section of the project is color coded by grade, and we were using VALUE.
So, this concept is new to all the kids at this campus.  We talked the definition, we did a smaller example with our fat ticonderoga pencils (however you spell it!) and then we were about to do the same with crayon.
One child speaks out as I am getting the crayons for them and says "Ms. P used to tell us not to use our SCREAMING pencils when we were practicing so we could vacuum it up if we didn't like it!"
Um, okay.....
I asked him to explain more... he said SCREAMING pencils was when you pressed REALLLY hard on the pencil to get it REALLLLY dark.  If you want it REALLLLY light, that is a whisper pencil!
AHHHHHHHH......
So, while they didn't understand the word value, they did understand some of the concept (see?  middle school teacher vs elementary school teacher here!  I'm getting it!) 
So, we did another example of value using SCREAMING pencil and fading it down to a whisper pencil.  I called it a VALUE Tornado!  Well, that's what it looked like!  :)

So then we started with crayon.  Simple.  They got that we could use SCREAMING crayon as well.... but as I was starting to color the sample area I heard, very quietly, "up and down, up and down, liiiiiitle bitty!  up and down, up and down, liiiiiitle bitty..."  I smiled to myself before turning around because by now the entire class was whispering it and it was so dang cute!
When I turned to them, the same kiddo said "That's what Ms. P used to say when she wanted us to color nice and smooth.  We use liiiiiiitle bitty marks to make everything nice."

Well, duh, now it's the third day of school and 12 classes were already coloring the way I had showed them, but.... again, there is a better way!  ;)

A little girl speaks up and says "BUT..... Mrs. Walton is going side to side!"  So the entire class breaks in to "side to side, side to side... littttttte bitty!" the entire time I colored my project space.

So now you know.... there you have it!  Just in case you wanted to know!

I've also learned about the "crayon belt", "superman" and "invisible man".  I wondered if they would ever be visiting my classroom.... more on that later!

Happy Saturday!!!

Mrs. Walton