The Little Old Trixie Who Was Not Afraid of Anything: The Movie

We performed our play on December 5th. After we performed the play, we filmed some scenes to make a movie of the play. Our movie is finally done! Watch it here:



The Little Old Trixie Who Was Not Afraid of Anything from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

To see the script we wrote, visit our Mo Willems website.

The Play!

We have our play tomorrow, Thursday December 5th, at 8:30am. Families are invited to attend, but we will also be making a video of the play for those who aren't able to be there.

We are very excited!

--
Stephen MacLellan
Lowell Elementary School
Watertown, MA
stephen.maclellan@watertown.k12.ma.us

Play Project

At the end of our author study of Mo Willems, we started a play project.

First, we read a book called The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, by Linda Williams.

Next, we chose characters from Mo Willems's books that we could use in our play. We wrote a script with these characters, and the new lines they would say.

We did a table read of the script, all sitting around the circle instead of standing up and acting. We did a number of table reads to help familiarize us with the script, our lines, and our cues.

Now, we are dividing up into working groups to tackle some of the details we need to attend to before we can perform the play.

We have a costume group. These students made a list of all the characters, and are designing a costume for each character.

We have a set group. These students are designing the set, and will direct others when we construct it.

We have an invitation, ticket, and promotion group. These students will choose who to invite, will design the invitations, the promotional material, and any handouts. They also had to choose what kind of tickets we would use. A big question was whether or not we needed to have a barcode on each ticket. If we don't have a barcode, some of us are worried that people who want to see the show could just make their own tickets out of paper at home. We will have to figure this problem out.

We have a prop group. These students read through the play and are deciding what props we need to have in the play. They need to get very specific. What kind of basket should Trixie carry with her on her walk in the forest? How will we get a basket?

Finally, we have a movie group. These students are developing the movie version of the play. They will make a shot list and conduct the necessary video recordings.

We have a lot of work, and not much time to do it! Like all performances, we might make a mistake, but the show must go on!

A copy of our script is attached at the bottom of this page on our class website.

Bean Taste Test

We had our bean taste test today! We shared the beans that we picked from the garden with Ms. Bean's class. 

Some of us love rice and beans. Some of us do not. Some of us only like beans a little. It is ok to have different foods that you like and don't like! We were all brave, and even students who do not like beans tried at least one bean.

When you talk to your family about our bean taste test, ask them if they had foods that they didn't like when they were little. Did their tastes change when they grew up?

--
Stephen MacLellan
Lowell Elementary School
Watertown, MA
stephen.maclellan@watertown.k12.ma.us

How do you cook beans?

Different people have different ways of cooking beans. Here's a video to show how I cook beans at my house. Your family might do it differently, and that's okay.

Bean tasting!

We harvested the beans, we counted the beans, now it's time to eat the beans!

Website update!

Our class website has had some big updates.

Watch our book reports here.

Hear some stories we wrote in IC.

Check out our newest website, We Love Mo Willems! We have lots of videos and some samples of work we did during our Mo Willems author study.

Fossil?

Today the scientists of Lab 204 looked at some rock samples. Each rock was different, and we noticed many details and had many questions we were wondering about.

One rock had what looked like a mark on it. Some people thought that mark was a leaf fossil, or a leaf print, or even a tire track left by a car or bicycle.

We had a science discussion about this rock. We agreed that it was probably from a plant, and that the plant looked a lot like some evergreen leaves we had looked at earlier in the week. We had some lingering questions, though:
- How could someone find this rock if it was made before people were on the Earth?
- Was it made by sand piling on top of other sand, with a leaf stuck in between?
- Is this a print of a leaf, or something else, like a leaf fossil?

In the science unit we are starting, we will be exploring rocks, water, and how the Earth changes over time. We will get to the idea of fossils and other evidence that scientists have about the ancient Earth, but not for a while!

Bean Harvest

Here are some more pictures from our bean and tomato harvest. Here, we were looking at the tomatoes before we pulled the vine from the ground.

1, 2, 3, PULL!

 

A Visit to the Garden

On Friday, our class visited the Lowell Learning Garden. We helped to harvest two kinds of vegetables: tomatoes and beans.

We picked two kinds of beans, purple beans and rattlesnake beans. We will let these beans dry in our classroom over the next week, and then we will take them out of the shell. When they are dry, they can be stored to cook with or to plant again in the spring.

We also picked Pink Brandywine tomatoes, a very old variety that you cannot buy in the grocery store. We learned that you can pick green tomatoes, and hang them upside down to ripen to red! Our tomatoes are hanging in our classroom, slowly turning red.

We worked with a gardener named Victoria who was very helpful in teaching us about the garden and these plants. Thank you, Victoria!

We make careful scientific observational drawings of our vegetables. We added labels to show which parts were which.