International Dot Day

We celebrated International Dot Day on Monday.  In case you are not familiar with Dot Day, it was started several years ago by educators who wanted to celebrate Peter Reynold's wonderful book, The Dot. In this book, a reluctant student is encouraged to "make her mark" on the world.

We spent our Dot Day talking about how we might make our marks on the world.

1.  We could make our mark by contributing our ideas in group discussions.

We started the day by reading The Dot. You can watch The Dot here if you're interested.

We also watched a video about Peter Reynolds.

Then, we practiced speaking and listening skills while we answered some discussion questions.  We worked on supporting our answers by referring to the text and using sentence starters like: "On page ___, it said", "The author wrote _____________", "An example is _______________", "I know because _________________", "In the book, it said _______________", and "One thing I noticed was that _______________________".

We also practiced being good listeners.  Only the person holding the "discussion dot" could be talking.

2.  We could make our mark by collaborating with people from other places.

We are very excited to have a buddy class in Atlanta, Georgia.  They celebrated Dot Day early and we know they wrote Dot Day postcards to us, so we painted watercolor dot postcards for them and added some short notes on the back.

3.  We could make our mark in the world by discovering something new in science or engineering.

We used Dot candy to conduct an experiment about the strength of buildings made with different geometric shapes.  We built cubes, 3-sided prisms and 4-sided prisms.  Each student made a hypothesis about which shape would be the strongest, then we tested our hypotheses.  Afterwards, we practiced making geodesic domes, like the one on the Middle School playground and bridges using squares and rectangles.  Here is a link to a project much like ours.

4.  We could make our mark as artists.

We learned about Vassily Kandinsky.  He was an abstract artist who believed art could be created with just colors, lines and shapes.  He believed different colors and shapes could show different emotions.  He also painted lots of pictures with dots!  One of his most famous paintings was one filled with concentric circles.  You can see a photo of it here.

We made our own Kandinsky-style art.

We thought our Dot Day activities were over at the end of the day, but then our buddy teacher in Georgia let us know about a very fun augmented reality  app, colAR Mix, that we could use to make our dots come to life.  So, we celebrated a little bit more.  Look how much fun everyone had seeing their dots turn into spheres.