Weeks of 9/19/24 and 9/16/24 - 2nd and 3rd grades

 2nd graders looked at the front cover of the book “That’s Not My Name” by Anoosha Syed and engaged in a class discussion during our 1st class of what the book was about by looking for clues. 

The main character in the book is Mirha. Her teacher and friends mispronounce her name at school which leads to Mirha wanting to change her name. A conversation with her mom leads Mirha to learn the meaning of her name which is "happiness" in Arabic. She goes back to school the next day with excitement to teach her friends about her name and how to deal with situations where students pronounce her name differently!

After reading the story, students shared an interesting fact about their name - some shared they were named after their grandpa, after a movie or a friend. Some shared the meaning of their name - “the gifted one”, “the loved one” among many others.

Each student practiced writing their name in several ways using pencil, picked the one they liked the best and wrote their name on a white poster board. They used a chisel tip black Sharpie to trace the letters and then used warm and cool color markers to create repetitive lines around their name.

They completed their work during the 2nd class and wrote something special about their name.

3rd graders looked at the comic book inspired works of artist Roy Lichtenstein - we had a class discussion of how the artist used dots similar to how comic books were printed back in the 1950s/ 60s. 

We noticed how the words used were sound words and had an exclamation point at the end, the letters used overlapping and that the colors were bright! We also talked about the Pop art movement, the word "pop" stood for "popular" and looked at several examples by other Pop artists. I introduced the word onomatopoeia to students and let them know we will create an artwork using their name as an onomatopoeia. 

We spent 2 classes cutting and layering paper in different shapes, added dots, name and also mounted our works on black paper. Students also wrote something new they learned in this lesson by filling out an exit slip.