Wright 3 Middle-schooler's Activity!

One Summer Three Books Program Our program for middle schoolers today was about the book The Wright Three by Blue Balliett. The sequel to Chasing Vermeer. In the book; Calder, Tommy, and Petra (who call themselves The Wright Three) learn that the famous Robie House is soon to be demolished. When their class takes a field trip to the house, the Wright Three find out that there are many mysteries concering the house that no one is aware of. Then they relize that they have to save this house! We discussed our two main questions: What is art? The kids decided it is a way of visually expressing yourself. Is a house a piece of art? To answer this, we looked at different design elements and architecual styles. Though we talked mainly about the Prairie Style: the architectual style used in the Robie House. (For more info on the Robie house, see the bottom of the article.) We discussed Fibonacci's Code, a sequence of numbers that appears very often in nature (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. just add the last to numbers.) and used in the prairie style. Then we looked at the architectual style in the ceiling of the library. We looked also looked for hidden pictures and numbers from Fibanocci's Code in the ceiling. Do you see any? So, now that we had decided that a house is a piece of art, the kids were given different kinds of crackers to design windows with hidden pictures in them, just like in The Wright 3! Click for more information on: Blue Balliet The Robie House Fibonacci's Code The Prairie Style Chicago Universty -Fernando Forero Youth Volunteer

Library Programs Rock!

We've had a great summer of reading! It's been all about catching the Reading Bug! Here are descriptions and pictures from the first programs.

We started the summer with a Rally for Reading on a stormy Saturday in May. Peter McCory, The One-Man Band, had everyone singing and dancing.
http://www.petermccory.com/
We even played some of his instruments! There was face painting, food, storybook readers, origami paper-folding and books to pick up and purchase from the Winchester Book Gallery.

It was the first time to register for the Summer Reading Club.

We began library programs two weeks later with Jerry Schneider teaching us about bugs in our backyard. We took some of his butterfly and dragonfly stencils and created one-of-a-kind t-shirts.

We had a great time exploring the library grounds while looking for grasses to add to our shirts. We wanted to make sure the butterflies and dragonflies were resting on something.




























We started with a t-shirt, stuffed it with newspaper, added the stencils and grasses and twigs and waited for our parents or other adults to spray our shirts with red or blue dye.

The sun helped to dry the shirt.

We had some great shirts at the end! Look at mine!