In Mrs.Donnelly’s 6th grade class this year, we did activities. A few of which I will talk about today.The first task I will talk about is the book The Last Cuentista and the importance of stories and sharing. In the book, Earth is no longer habitable, and the agency that brought the main character’s ship to a new planet wiped all memory of culture, stories, and anything not of us scientifically.
Except, they failed to do so with Petra, the main character, and she tries to keep stories going. While not being caught by the memory-wipers with a misguided view of humanity. This book tries to give the message that stories bring us together. That is a precious thing.
Another activity we did in class this year, was writing about our ideal world, you can see mine in a previous blog post: https://29cyruspo.edublogs.org/2023/02/23/my-ideal-world/
My ideal world tried to get the maximum pleasure out of life, by taking out anything that would take away from pleasure. It involved robot servants, customizable houses, and a lack of violence, or firearms. I think this was a good way for some to see how they could change the world for the better. I was one of those people, even though my ideal world included a lot of ideas that are impossible.
The third thing I will talk about is book-making with Peg Gignoux. Ms.Gignoux is an artist who came into DA and helped us 6th graders make books to fit with our Ideal world projects. To be honest this was not my favorite LA project, but it seemed to be delightful to many, so I would recommend the experience. The first step in book-making was to print colors onto old scraps of paper with a leaf in between the ink and the paper. This caused some crazy designs! Next, we folded some paper so it would be in a book format. We then collaged the inside of the book a lot, And got a great book, once we glued our covers onto the book.
From all of these projects, the conclusion I got was that stories, art, ideas are precious components of human civilization, and using them, we can get a better understanding of the world, us, and everything in between.