Art That Moves!

Can you make visual art using sound?  Martin Klimas does. 
 

He chooses paint, positions it on top of a speaker, then turns the volume up loud.  The music causes the speaker to vibrate, sending the paint flying, and the images are captured in Klimas' beautiful photographs.



This is paint propelled by Miles Davis' "Pharaoh's Dance."

"Drumming" by Steve Reich and Musicians helped create this image.



For more on Martin Klimas' work, click here.





Joshua Allen Harris makes inflatable street art that comes alive on the streets of New York, using wind from underground subway trains and plastic garbage bags.

These artists create elaborate symmetrical patterns by pouring cups of contrasting paint over an elevated surface and letting gravity do the work.

Do you have an innovative approach to creating art?  Send me an email and we'll share your work here.

Math, Money, and Motivation

Walgrove Elementary 4th graders are in the final stages of fundraising for a spring field trip to Sacramento.  The trip for 50+ students and 10 adults will cost over $17,000, and after successful raffle, bake sale, pledge drive and holiday bazaar, there is around $1000 to raise.

So each student decorated a gallon jug, and began collecting spare change from friends, family, piggy banks and patrons.

After collecting change for a few weeks, counting day finally arrived, and students broke into groups to count it.  Each group designed a strategy for sorting and counting, estimated their total before counting, and turned in a tally sheet at the end of the session.  This gave them lots of authentic and motivated experience working with decimals to two place values, equivalent fractions, and estimating, ordering and comparing numbers, which are all 4th grade content standards in mathematics.

Students were encouraged to use divergent thinking, and I observed a variety of different counting and sorting methods. 

Will the Walgrove 4th graders raise enough money to visit Sacramento?  Stay tuned!

Air & Water: Feeling the Pressure

Recently, StudioLab teacher Ms. Ariel led Ms. Perez' first grade class in hands-on investigations using syringe pumps, tubes, Styrofoam and tubs of water to observe the effects of air pressure and suction, and explore the properties of air and water.

First, Ariel described and modeled the session's two activities, and invited predictions and hypotheses from the students.

Ariel explained that students would take turns working in pairs in two stations.  In the dry station, the class would experiment with two syringe pumps joined by plastic tubing.  Ariel suggested they try different connections and techniques, to see what sounds and effects might be created with the materials.

 In the second station, students would discover what happens when a cylinder is submerged in water, with and without a small piece of Styrofoam.  As Ariel demonstrated, and bubbles escaped,  she asked the class to think about what made the bubbles, and why the Styrofoam sometimes floated, and sometimes seemed pushed to the bottom, depending upon how the cylinder was positioned.

Next it was the students' turn...

Jeffrey: "It sucks up Paloma's cheek!"

Paloma: "It felt like a vacuum cleaner!"

Jeffrey: "It sucked her skin in, and when we push, it goes back in."

Parker: "I'm wondering if the air would push something else out."

Ms. Perez works alongside her students.

 

These hands-on explorations of the properties of liquids and gasses supports the California state standards for 1st grade Science, in the areas of Physical Sciences, Investigation and Experimentation.

For more on Walgrove's Studio Lab Program, go to http://publicschoolstudio.blogspot.com/p/faq.html.

Scale: It's All Relative

It's hard to believe, but these are grains of sand, magnified 100-250 times.

Photo copyright: Dr. Gary Greenberg

This is one of the cosmic images depicting newborn stars, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope:

Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

They're gorgeous images, but it's difficult to fully comprehend their size when they're viewed in isolation, without other familiar objects with which to compare them.

How do you explain the size of bacteria?  Or the distance to the sun?

The most effective illustration I've found that depicts the size of things immensely vast and invisibly minute is The Scale of the Universe 2, a flash application created by Cary Huang that is available free online.  With the touch of a scroll bar, learners can zoom from the tiniest quark and neutrino to the outer edge of our observable universe, comparing the relative size of thousands of things in between.

Check it out for yourself here:  http://www.htwins.net/scale2/

Every single time I've played with this application, I've been struck by something new.  The possibilities seem...infinite.

Tragedy of The Commons

Photo credit: Dan Barbus at www.everystockphoto.com

How can we better work together to manage and care for our community resources?  What natural consequences occur over time when people act only in their own interest in the short term?  These are among the questions that ecologist Garrett Hardin described in his prescient 1968 article "Tragedy of the Commons", which provided a jumping off point for a fourth and fifth grade exploration in the Studio Lab.


Students worked in small groups, and each represented a "family" in a lakeside community.  A piece of paper stood in for the lake, and 16 goldfish crackers represented the fish living in it.  Studio Teacher, Julia Gonzales, described the scenario: Each year, each family will catch "fish" from the lake.  They need one fish for their family to survive, two fish enable them to live very comfortably, and if they caught more, they can sell them for a profit. 

Students took turns "catching" fish for the first round, which represented the first year.  At this point, they learned new information: that each fish remaining in the pond can reproduce, doubling the number that survive.

Each team then proceeded to "fish" for three more turns, or "years", and recorded their catch and fish population data on a group data sheet.

Ms. Julia led the class in a discussion of their data, and the effect that each community's choices had on the sustainability of the lake's resources.

Some individuals chose to catch the maximum number of fish at each turn, quickly depleting the lake's population of fish.  Other groups planned more carefully, ensuring that their community would thrive on an abundance of fish. 

The Tragedy of the Commons exercise uses math skills to explore themes students are learning in Social Studies, as well as their Life Science unit about ecosystems, biodiversity, organism survival, and competition in food chains.  It provides entry for ongoing discussion about environmental stewardship, global hunger and pollution, and extends students' awareness of how they might better manage their own shared resources, by re-shelving their own books in the library, for example.

For another perspective on the Tragedy of the Commons, here is a brief animated summary that you might like to check out:

If you have trouble viewing it, try this link instead: Tragedy of the Commons.

For more on Walgrove's Studio Lab Program, click here: http://publicschoolstudio.blogspot.com/p/faq.html .

Words as Art

If you'd like to explore a new way to illustrate the beauty in words, then you might like to make a Wordle!  Wordle is a program that creates "word clouds" from text.  It's free, easy to use, and accessible at www.wordle.net. 

To create a Wordle, simply choose a set of words to import, and then select an arrangement, font, and color combination you like the best.  If a word is repeated within your imported set, it will appear larger in the resulting word cloud, so it's fun to experiment with different combinations.  I'm finding that Wordles have endless applications, especially in the classroom.

You can import any set of words into Wordle: a favorite poem, a speech, a story.  Here is a Wordle of the U.S. Constitution:

In September, I asked fourth and fifth grade students in room 15 to complete a questionnaire (inquiring about themselves, their hobbies, favorite books, etc.,) then entered their responses into the Wordle program.  I think you'll agree that the results appear as varied and distinctive as the students themselves.

It was a great "get to know each other" activity, and the students had fun reading each others' Wordles when we put them on display in the classroom.

The activity had a slightly different purpose last year in Kindergarten, when I created individual Wordles as a farewell gift for the students at the end of the school year.





For the Kindergarteners, in addition to their questionnaire responses, I included words and phrases that they had used during the year in class. The result was a personalized Whole Language resource of meaningful words that they could practice reading over the summer. 

To see other Wordles, and to make one yourself, go to www.wordle.net.  You can print or save your creations, or choose to share them online in the Wordle gallery.

Try it out, and let me know what you think!

With Appreciation...

This week, the students in Room 15 participated in the Holiday Mail For Heroes program by writing letters and crafting greeting cards for active and injured members of the U.S. military, veterans, and their families.  

This seemed like an appropriate way to acknowledge Veterans Day, share gratitude in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday, explore the "Making A Difference" theme of our new Language Arts unit, and refresh student letter writing and design skills.

If you'd like to take part in the Holiday Mail for Heroes program, check the above link for guidelines, and plan to mail your cards and letters no later than December 9.