San Francisco Days!

TODAY'S ACTIVITY
We are hitting our stride with discovering our fair city of San Francisco. It began last week with the introduction of photos, surveys and stories. These were followed by several mini-activities meant to stimulate thinking about where we live:

• Draw your favorite animal at the zoo.
• Paint your favorite place.
• Draw your house.
• Make a handprint for a tree.

In doing these activities the children were developing their visual communication skills, using highly descriptive and narrative drawing. They exercised their language skills as they conversed about some of the same and different places they had been. They refined their drawing, painting and cutting skills tremendously. Our room looked like it had snowed by the end of each day.

Initially, we had hoped to build a "bank" of images that they could use for our collage pieces. Instead, they developed their skills of observation and visualization so well that they keep producing more and more buildings, animals, creatures, cars, roads, robots and people that this unit will likely continue for a while.

Take a gander at these beautiful collages, done collaboratively with a bare minimum assistance from the teachers. Students were responsible for making and placing their elements. These photos were taken at the halfway point, and I'm missing the "Painted Ladies of Alamo Square."

Lombard Street

San Francisco Zoo

Downtown

The Golden Gate (complete with sea life)

One student was so excited by the whole process that he exclaimed, "We should make all the things bigger and put them on the walls so our whole room IS San Francisco!"

I think he's onto something.


TODAY'S STORY
Maybelle The Cable Car, by Virginia Lee Burton, who went to art school here in San Francisco many decades ago. It very succinctly tells the tale of how one cable car saw San Francisco grow from a small village to a prosperous, major city that considered eliminating the cable cars altogether. It chronicles the grassroots effort of citizens to successfully preserve this history that was almost lost entirely.

She is, by far, my favorite author of children's books. We all should be able to recall Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and The Little House. The concepts of time and evolution recurring theme in Burton's work. Each story maintains a constant in the characters, whose challenge is to remain useful and vital as the world changes around them. That the story of Maybelle is non-fiction (aside from vehicles that talk to each other with bells and horns) further reinforces the human connection. The book ends as it began.

"..when the city felt small and friendly, and everyone knew everyone else..."

Here's an interactive animation that shows HOW CABLE CARS WORK!