Days 3 and 4 - Bike the Arts Preview

On Thursday and Friday we began previewing many of the stops that will be on Kettering's Bike the Arts ride this Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. at the Welker-Rollins Studio behind the Town and Country Shopping Center. Students will be on hand at the school on Saturday to show cyclists around the school and highlight many of the amazing art our students produce. Some of the pictures below are from our ride today. Many thanks to Mr. Federinko for bringing us our lunches to us and to Mrs. Emmons for joining us on our rides these past two days! Check out the pictures below for some of the trip highlights and a preview of what you'll get to see on the ride this Saturday!

Join us this weekend and join the Bike the Arts Event on Facebook!

A limestone sculpture at Delco Park.

We Care Arts is an organization dedicated to empowering individuals with disabilities through art.

Artists at We Care Arts produce art through a variety of different mediums, much of it going on sale in the lobby.

This is one of the many examples of cool art we found at We Care Arts, Inc.

We stopped at the Kettering Government Center, which also houses a lot of works of art.

Our ride through Central Park to the spot where we ate lunch. Check out that line! Students are doing an awesome job following the rules of the road.

We had our first flat while out on the road today. Our students handled it like pros and were back out riding in no time. It didn't hurt that we waited at Dairy Queen while changing the tube!

Waiting in line at Dairy Queen.

The pictures below are from Friday's ride to the Welker-Rollins Studio. 

Students got to talk with Terry for quite a while and hear about his current project, Fractal Rain, which is going to be installed in the Dayton library. We can't thank him enough for his hospitality!

 

All in all it was a fun week, and we have now visited all of the stops on this year's Bike the Arts Tour. Check out yesterday's post to read more about the Rosewood Arts Centre, which the students were also fortunate enough to visit. We hope you'll do the ride as well on Saturday and stop by to see our school as you visit many of the other awesome art destinations around the city this Saturday! 

The Living Lens Project and the Conflict and Genocide Posters are just two examples of the artwork you will see and hear about at the school this weekend. We look forward to welcoming you and we even have a small gift for our visitors!

Day 2 - Math, Rosewood Arts, and Bike Maintenance

Today students used math to figure out how the gears they select affect the ease with which they are able to pedal. They calculated the gear ratios of their bikes by counting the number of teeth in their chain rings and cogs and counting the number of pedal revolutions vs. wheel revolutions. You can check out this lesson and even do this on your own at home. Special thanks to former DRSS teacher and current Wright State Instructor, Peggy Kelly, for teaching the class this morning!

Mrs. Kelly talks about gear ratios.

Mr. Grieve struggles to understand the math the students are doing.

Riding the bike was a part of this experiment. Good excuse to ride in school!

Thanks to Doug and Sam for being our faculty assistants. Here they are pictured working diligently to ensure every whistle has a lanyard.

At the end of the lesson Mrs. Kelly explains how the relationship between the number of pedal revolutions (the Independent Variable) and the number of wheel rotations (Dependent Variable) is linear.

Next, we took a short 10-mile ride to Rosewood Arts Centre, one of the stops on this weekend's Bike the Arts Ride, sponsored by the Kettering Arts Council. It's happening this Saturday starting at 10AM. Check out their Facebook Event for more details. Hopefully you can make it out, as we are a stop on the trip! You can find out more about the classes offered at the Rosewood Arts Centre on their website's "Learn" page.

Join the event and find more details at this link!

The Rosewood Arts Centre

One of the cool pieces at the Rosewood Centre.

The Glass Studio!

Special thanks to Jennifer Morris for showing us around!

One of our favorite pieces!

The pottery studio takes up three rooms! You can take classes nearly every day.

We popped into a class to get a little information on pottery.

Some of the pottery after being glazed and fired.

Finally in the afternoon we were lucky enough to have a visit from Brian Witten of K & G Bike Center who spoke to the kids about bike maintenance and how to do things like change a flat tire. This is his second year visiting the class. Special thanks to Brian and K & G for donating their time to the class! For the students whose bikes he didn't have time to work on, they have a number of locations across the Dayton area. You can check them out on Facebook as well.

Brian explains how to check your brakes.

Brian using one of our students' bikes to show how to change a flat. Students really learned a lot!

Thanks to Brian for sticking around afterwards and helping kids out with individual bike problems!

Tomorrow we'll be previewing some of the other stops on the Kettering Bike the Arts Ride so we can help put together a brochure for people who aren't able to make it out this weekend. Hopefully you can make it out though!

Day 1 - Bike Safety/Mini Ride

Today was a fun introductory day as students got familiar with their bikes and had a visit from former President of the Cincinnati Cycling Club, John Chester. We spent the first half of the morning doing bike safety talks, then went outside to practice all the skills we had learned in class until we mastered them. Students now know how to signal properly and communicate using hand and verbal signals while riding.

John coaching the kids before they run the course.

Mrs. Curran provides some coaching to students about making a complete stop and signaling properly.

After lunch we went on a short ride (6.4 miles round-trip) to State Farm Park in Kettering.

Crossing Spaulding Road on our way to State Farm Park.

Hanging out at State Farm.

After that, students came back and found out that our first project is helping Kettering's Bike the Arts program by going around to find pictures of the stops that are going to be on this Saturday's ride, including our very own school, DRSS! You're more than welcome to join them this Saturday, starting at 10AM. Find event details on their Facebook Event page. Students who help us "show off the school" this Saturday should arrive by 11AM and likely will be here till around 12PM or until the riders have visited our school, whichever comes first. Hopefully you can make it!

Kickoff meeting for 2014/2015 Class! Friday - May 8, 2015 at 12:15 in Grieve's room

Welcome! On Friday Mr. Grieve will be welcoming our new students and asking them to fill out the "Class Welcome Form" on the links to the right after going through a brief introduction to the class and what we'll be doing this year. Mr. Grieve will also be going over requirements for type of bicycles students must have and what kinds of tires will work best for our riding and how to find tire sizes.

See you tomorrow!