How we Express Ourselves - Unit 5

We began our inquiry into the unit - "Sounds help us understand and express our world," under the theme - How we express ourselves.

Tuning In 

Kinesthetic Pre- Assessment Activities

As a warm up we were made aware that the vibrations of the vocal cords are responsible for our voice.

Post that we went into an action coordinated activity tap,clap snap to understand sounds are produced through simple actions

Post that one of us then had to mime like any character/ animal/ object produce the required sound. We engaged in improvised movement activities that included walking, stomping.

Synchronized movement

We worked in 2 groups. Each group was given a prop. We were given 20 seconds to create a simple coordinated performance with the props. Through this activity we focused on peer coordination, time and Space and sound.

The next day our music teachers Mr Madhav and Mr Ronnie, brought along with them various musical instruments. We were given a chance to play whatever we wanted with them (unorganized sound)

When we reflected on this we realized the sounds we were creating were unpleasant and was just
 " noise"

We went back a second time to explore the instruments, only this time we had the task to create organised sound. We worked with our team members and presented the sounds to our classmates. 

Each team was given feedback from the other teams.

We then compared between "noise" and "music" using a Venn diagram

Unfolding the Central idea
In groups we brainstormed to come up with a central idea of the unit. Once we had shared our thoughts and looked at the central idea we realized we had come very close. 

Student's voice 

 Brainstorming the possible Summative tasks
We then got into our groups and thought about what could be the summative task for this unit that twill help our teachers assess our understanding of the central idea.
These are the summative assessments we came up with - 

Finding out 

We began to dig deeper through an activity - Onomatopoeia

We were given different sound words on pieces of paper and were asked to create a movement sequence with the words (Sitting and standing)

Sound and Volume in Drama
Loud/Soft
We had to create 2 different sized word bubbles  and write words or phrases that use the appropriate volume(Loud or Soft)
The words were placed in front of the students. Each one of us had to dramatize any one word or phrase. We completed their explanation of the word bubble chart.

We heard music of different moods and drew what each music made us feel.


Post a discussion we then created a small tune without any instrument. Our peers tried to identify the mood we were trying to create.

Going Further
To understand instruments deeper, we researched about different families of musical instruments.

Presentation time
We presented our findings through Google slides

Voice Volume and Voice projection

The story,'Horton Hears a Who!' was explained to the students to further develop their understanding of voice projection through characters in a story.

Voice,Volume, Movement and Tempo

The students participated in a teacher and student led improvised movement activity that focused on responding to different sounds and understanding contrast.

Sound, Image Collage 
We were then given some pictures and we had to create a sound effect for them.

We were given random newspaper pictures. Each of us had to write the appropriate sound for that picture

Further to the above different picture books were placed around the room. We had move around the room and write a sentence and sound words matching that sentence.

We moved on to understand the creation cycle in

Brainstorming what we want to express about....

Creating our music to represent our mood......

Recording our sounds......

Creating our movies on I movie to express our thoughts, feelings and ideas

Our final presentations ...

We are proud of our achievement sin Taekwondo

We are feeling sorry about the state of farmers in our country

We are nostalgic about our Panchgani trip

\We are super excited of the upcoming Spring break

Language

We explored how a sentence can be made interesting for the reader to read. We understood how important it is to help the reader form an image in their mind through the descriptive writing.We then began learning about stories. We began by understanding the elements of a story

Character study

We read different stories and identified different character traits.  

We put ourselves in the characters shoes and tried to think of what he /she would say as per their trait.

Show not Tell

We looked at how a writer describes the feeling or expression of the character through his words, actions, reactions etc. We learnt how to make our stories more exiting by adding a lot of details.

We are now working on creating our own stories.

Stay tuned to know what we are going to do with these mystery...fantasy.... adventure stories we  creating!

Math

We have been busy learning about time and calculating elapsed time

We also explored the concept of Area and Perimeter. 

We began by reading the story - 

We read the book till the part the guest started moving the tables around. We decided to help Mrs Comfort set the tables so that all the guests would be happy. Each group was given 32 small squares to represent the chairs and 8 big squares to be put as tables. We worked around different permutations and combinations and finally realized that the only way to get 32 tables is that way Mrs Comfort had originally set the tables.

Going further we worked on different sums to strengthen our understanding of the concept.

We were challenged with designing a farm and then calculating the perimeter and area of the same. We also calculated the cost of the fencing.

We would like to say a big THANK YOU to our art teacher Ms. Delnaz, for the awesome display of our art work.