I've been so busy lately but I have been wanting to write about this project for the last few weeks. Right off the bat, I wanted to say how proud I am of my 3rd graders for handling such a serious topic. Over spring break, Brussels experienced a horrific attack upon their city. Like our Paris project after their attack, I thought we would take a couple classes to honor Belgium with a project. We had a down-to-Earth discussion about what happened in Belgium and I was so impressed with how well they handled the topic. In the center of Brussels is a large courtyard. Once every two years, they cover the courtyard in a design made of locally-grown begonia flowers. Each time they make the flower carpet, their design is based on a new theme.

I used Don Masse's project idea for his mud cloths and spun it towards what I wanted to cover. Throughout the project, we talked about warm colors, geometric shapes, and symmetry. After cutting and gluing shapes for a couple classes, they finished it off by adding some more intricate details with warm colored crayons.

This was probably one of my favorite projects from the year. They did such an awesome job on it!

With spring break fast approaching, 3rd grade knocked this quick project out of the park! We super duper quickly looked at a few of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings. His paintings are a combination of various shapes and lines. This lead into a discussion about the two different  kinds of shapes: organic and geometric. We also looked at and named a bunch of different lines.

For the background, we took some of our scrap paper and made 3 organic shapes and 3 geometric. After gluing those down, we made all kinds of crazy lines! To make the lines, we took a strip of paper and cut little tabs down one side of it. Then we folded the tabs in either direction so that we could bend and curve our line easily. Students were also encouraged to intersect lines.