Ninety-One School

Mrs. Perrin's third grade class has been working diligently on their writing. The students collectively wrote a short, precise and non-fiction paragraph about an artist they had studied: Keith Haring. As you can see from the writing below, the students have been working on word choice and organization. Their words invite us, the readers, to find out more about the artist they describe. In addition, they each contributed to the beautiful pastel poster that you can see in this photograph. Each student had a piece of the mosaic and had to work with other students to make sure the way they colored the poster would work once the mosaic was pasted together. (If you click on the photo of the mosaic, you can see the "tiles" the students had to coordinate! It is quite intricate.) Stop by the classroom to see their work of art and their collective paragraph!

Here is their non-fiction paragraph:

Keith Haring was a famous artist. He painted church and subway walls during the day. Keith worked during the day because he liked an audience. He struggled through AIDS, but he wanted his work to live on.

The writing just keeps happening in Mrs. Perrin's room. Today, they began a short unit on synonyms and the use of a thesaurus. After listening to Dr. Seuss' delightful book, My Many Colored Days, the students worked in small groups to find numerous synonyms to use instead of the "blah" color words: red, blue, yellow, green, and orange. Instead, they found words such as "magenta, cobalt, marigold, emerald, amethyst". They presented their posters full of color words to their classmates. Then, they began to write, using a poetry frame, their own poems using colors. Within a few days, we will be able to see full color poems with similes and metaphors!