Day 33: Lori Wilson, Teacher, Chaparral School

Today I learned about creativity and risk-taking; my own as well as my students. We were exploring fall colours in our grade one class, and were working on creating a project using the signs of fall that we collected.  

In looking at this job I immediately began to think of how to make the project as easy and mess free as possible, and then I realized my mistake.  I missed the important question of ‘why’.  Why should we paint?  What could student learn with this job?  How is painting a background engaging?  

So instead of simply putting pallets of brown, orange, yellow, red and purple paint out onto tables, we incorporated a colour-mixing lesson into our project.  I explained that we needed to use fall colours for our work, but that we only had primary paint colours to work with.  Swirling students eagerly mixed colours together and excitedly shared how to create orange and purple; matching their samples to the leaf samples around the room.  Then some students noticed that we also needed brown, and teams of students worked together, heads bent to make this new colour. Wild cheers filled the room as a team announced they had found the formula.  Had I done this project as first planned we would have ended up with a nice picture, what we ended up with instead was a great story of how we created fall.

Lori Wilson teaches grade one in Calgary, loves camping, reading and hanging out with her family.