Ask Me About Monday, May 2, 2016

Today we worked more with a Thinking and Academic Success Skill we are working with this marking period.  We learned more about being original in our thinking.  We focused on turning the ideas of others into something new and different.  To understand this better, I showed the children a short video clip of The Dying Swan, from Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens.  We watched a traditional version of the ballet first, then compared it to another version by Yo Yo Ma and Lil Buck.  Here are the two videos.  Ask me to tell you what I notice that is the same and how they are different.

Today we also read two more Cinderella stories.  We read Cindy Ellen: A Wild Western Cinderella, by Susan Lowell, and then later The Salmon Princess; An Alaska Cinderella Story, by Mindy Dwyer.  You can imagine how excited we were to find that the fairy godmother in The Salmon Princess was an eagle!  Ask me to tell you about how the setting and characters made the story original, even though it is based on the fairy tale Cinderella.  
In the computer lab, and in math today, we worked with graphing.  We collected data to find which version of the Cinderella stories we liked most.  The versions we voted on are just the ones we watched a clip of or read the book.  We have 23 Cinderella books so this could change!   Here is our graph. Ask me to tell you what our graph shows.

We made storyboards of how we would present the story of Cinderella in an original way.  Many of the children relied on using characters they were familiar with already to start their storyboard.  Some chose the setting first, which led to the characters they would put in their book.  They also thought about what magic would be in the story, as well as what the ball would be like in their version.  

Have a nice evening!
Juliet
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