So Close!

So we drew an earth and we copied it from a globe, even though it isn't exact, it came out pretty good. We painted the border orange and the main part of the mural purple. Then we traced our hands and decorated them and also decorated letters and cut the hands out with our 1st grade buddies. We painted the earth different shades of blue and green. We're still not sure whether the earth should have sunglasses, regular glasses or no glasses. Some people want sunglasses because they think it will look funny, other's don't because it will cover up hard work, and take away attention from the other part of the mural. - - Jenny

I think we should have a globe with sunglasses because the kids at the school have a big hallway and it's full of nothing (and Ms. Broderick worked there). If we put the globe with the sunglasses we can show it that it's a little bit humorous and makes you chuckle a bit, but it's also about literacy. If someone is having a bad day, they can look at it and be happy. - - Osiris

first meeting with the 5th grade

Here are some ideas from 5A about the structure of our mural:

body: a book, border: children doing literacy activities.
painting around the outside of the mural

we can (help the first graders) paint the background either 1 or 2 colors

we cut out people ahead of time:

we put a planet in the middle, holding a book:

Put the alphabet around the border

attendees can make books or letters in the middle:

maybe the planet (a faceless world) is reading the book to the kids. we could cut out letters and people. Kids could write the names of their favorite books on a piece of paper to put on the mural.

Maybe the books would be a bi-fold. front would be the title and author, inside would be the favorite part. perhaps we could have book cards where kids could write summaries of their stories/biographies/any genre. Concern that the covers may fall off.