Art - Ryijys and Castles

In Finland, the ryijy is a traditional craft made from yarn. Basically it's a shag carpet!! These have been made in Finland for hundreds of years, and they use to be used in homes as textiles. Nowadays they are merily for decoration on the walls. They can be also quite expensive, hundreds of euros, because of the amount of time that it takes to do a large piece of art.
I had my class just try it out and practice the technique. I only required them to make a few lines with the yarn. 

Then for our castles. We collected cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls for this project. It took us many weeks to accomplish. We also made a base for the castle from cardboard boxes (which I diligently cut in advance for the students). When it was all done, students then created characters for their castles. They enjoyed this project very much!

Non-fiction books and Shape poems

It's officially been one month since summer vacation started.
The summer weather here is not that great, cloudy and rainy. So I'm a bit bummed about that.
Some of our English projects for the end of the year:
- writing poems
- writing own non-fiction book
The non-fiction books was total fun for the 2nd graders. We had a few mini-lessons how to take the facts read in the book and rewrite them to be our own sentences for our own books. They got really excited about writing on sticky notes and collecting their notes. And wouldn't you know it, there was a handful of students that of course were not paying attention during those mini lessons, and did their notes all wrong. They had copied directly from the book. Well I decided they would then start again. I'm so mean!

Here are a few finished book pictures. Enjoy!

Here then are two shape poems: