Tall Tales- The Remarkable Farkle McBride

Today's book was The Remarkable Farkle McBride by John Lithgow. None of the students had heard this book yet, so it was fun reading it to them for the first time.

Our first project of the day was building a drum out of recycled materials. The parents were asked to bring a cylindrical container for their child. We had coffee cans, juice containers, milk jugs, oatmeal containers, etc. The children used the materials that we have accumulated over the last 4 days to decorate their drums. Some of them even added to the inside of their drums so that they could not only be drums, but be maracas, as well.

The next project was one that I have seen multiple times- Kandinsky's circles. The children folded their paper into 8 sections. They used oil pastels to color and add circles. Some of the children decided they didn't want circles and they added hearts, stars and other shapes. 

Our last project of the day was an emotion painting. Each student had a canvas (11x14). There was a selection of acrylic paint, brushes and small sponges on the tables. They were asked to paint using their emotions. There was also music playing, so they were able to use the music as inspiration. The novelty of having their own canvas was inspiration enough for some of the children!

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Fourth Grade African Drums

 This was the last project that the 4th graders did for the year. I will have the finished ones on display at the beginning of the year, when we go back to school in August.

I found the lesson plan on the Crayola website: African Drum

We began the project by looking at different examples of African drums.

Then I had them do a couple of sketches in their sketchbooks to show what they wanted their drum to look like.

They traced 2 circles onto muslin and cut them out. We used fabric markers to color the fabric and then I had them use a pencil to punch holes around the outside of the fabric so that they would be able to string their drum at the end.

The drums were made with 2 bowls. I used paper/cardboard bowls and they colored them with a random assortment of markers that I had collected throughout the year.

I had them punch 2 holes into the bottom of each bowl and then they tied the bowls together, so that they would not move.

When they were ready to string their drum, I had them glue the muslin to the bowl (the first class didn't do this, and had all kinds of difficulty with the fabric moving and falling off) and then they used string that I had left over to string the drums.

The very last step was to paint the fabric with a mixture of glue and water so that it would harden the fabric. Pin It