A Cautionary Art Tale

Oh Pinterest. Oh Art Blogs. You give us such high hopes. Such lofty dreams. Sometimes the ideas I find online are gold! They work great, my kids love them, everything goes as planned. This is not one of those times.

I found this fabulous art blog called "Art Is What I Teach". I really do love this blog. She comes up with some really creative projects to teach basic art skills. Really outside the box.

I came across this awesome looking "Jellyfish Art" project a few months ago and thought my kiddos would love it. I Pinned it and moved on. I went onto my boards to find a nice art project for our last one of the year and was reminded how awesome this one looked. My kids have been one of the best classes I have had for using paint and not making big messes (just the regular residual mess, but no fooling around mess). So I decided to give it a try.

I decided that we would do this outside on the cement sidewalk behind my classroom door to lessen the mess. We have slanted desk tops and not much in the way of group tables in our room. We have done art outside before and it worked perfectly.

My art volunteer and my summer student got the tables set up and covered in newspaper. I mixed the paint (watery) and cut the bristol board. I brought the supplies outside and called my kiddos out, six at a time to keep thing orderly. The other stayed busy inside the classroom with their end of the year puzzle books.

Not even five minutes in, I hear yelling and turn to find two cups of paint had tipped onto two different art projects and were running all over the table, onto the cement, but thankfully, not onto my kiddos, who jumped out of the way. I grabbed the sudsy bucket, wiped down what I could and we covered the top with more paper.

I then came up with this little gem of an idea. I put the paint cups into any old plastic tubs I could find in my classroom (most are empty right now as I am cleaning the room out).

It worked perfectly. My summer student sarcastically asked why I couldn't have thought of that earlier.

For this project, the kids paint sloppy, wet paint circles and then hold their paper up to let it drip and make tentacles for their jellyfish. A few kids got a little too enthusiastic with their papers and were shaking/flapping them in the wind, getting paint on their clothes, arms, faces, shoes. Ug. We used my sudsy bucket and got most of it off, but it was a logistical nightmare, even with only a fraction of my class outside at a time! I didn't even attempt to do the final "splatter paint" at the end. I figured the fish were enough!

In the end, it made for a memorable last art project and they turned out really cool. The moral of the story is, beware of projects that may seem simple, because they probably aren't!

A few more days to go. On Monday, we are going to the Waterfun park for the day. Tuesday is pack up and sort day combined with Water Fun Afternoon with the Student Activities team. The we have a half day on Wednesday, Grade Eight graduation in the the evening. That's it! Of course, we have meetings on Thursday and other duties to complete, but my career at this school is coming to a close much too quickly for my liking.

See you soon!


UPDATE: When we made our end of the year memory books, I couldn't believe how many kids listed this as their favourite art project of the year! Go figure!

Mother's Day Art

This week we made our mom's beautiful purses full of memories. The idea was inspired by a post on Kindergarten Love. 
I took the idea and made my own templates, a little larger than hers. The kids traced the templates on pretty paper, folding the tab on the front over the back piece to glue them together.

Each purse was decorated with a flower. I found a few different templates when I searched online.

And inside was a cute little book with pictures of them and their mom. They also filled out information about mom. Some really cracked me up. Leave it to kids to be so honest!

My mom forgets to bring me to Toys R Us!

My mom forgets to do the laundry sometimes.

My mom forgets to play!

My mom is happy when I be good.

My mom forgets to bring her camera.

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! I wanted to share a couple of art projects that we did to celebrate. These could easily be adapted for other units and projects. The first one is a cute Earth painting using handprints. We also made pledges to do little things to help God's Creation. I found the idea here.

"Use reusable containers for my lunch"

"Play outside instead of playing video games"

"turn off the water when brushing my teeth"

"use reusable water bottles"

The second project we did reused water bottles as stamps. The petals are the bottom and cap is the centre. We used fingers to make the leaves. I am planning to use the bottles for another project. I adapted this from a project on this site.

I have really enjoyed looking at all of the Earth Day celebrations my fellow bloggers have been sharing. Hope it's been a good week!

Spring into Grade One/Two

I decided that our classroom was looking rather drab... so we perked up the ceiling! My kiddos coloured these beautiful butterflies, as we reinforced the concept of symmetry from our math lessons and insects from our science (yeah for cross curricular!) We now look up into a rainbow of colours! A few finished early and made some kite, too. 

On the first day of Spring, we talked about how the trees would change (we didn't have much snow on our trees this winter, but you get the idea) They loved this project.

So, how have you celebrated Spring in your classroom decor?

 

What Have We Been Up To Now?

I am certain this is the question my principal asks every time he walks in our room! So many crazy things happening, but I truly love every minute of it! I have had more people tell me over the last few months "You are SO perfect for this grade level!" I think it is my relatively sing-songy voice and penchant for dress up!

Here are a few things we did over February and March!

 Every year, the Grade Seven and Eight students take on the leadership role in preparing our School-Wide Winter Fun afternoon. This year, unfortunately, we had zero snow! 

They came up with some great alternatives. 

-The teams built "snow towers" from marshmallows and tooth picks.

-They pitted teams against each other in "snow volleyball" (played with white balloons) and "snowball fight" (seen in the picture, using crumpled up paper). The last one was held in my room. I found those little crumpled up balls for a week afterwards, on the tops of bookcases, in my bags and even inside a students' desk!

 -Teams created their own team poster. Each team had a colour and a cute name like "Purple Ponies" or "Snow Ninjas". Some teams really went overboard with the glitter paint!

-And lastly, they set up a great obstacle course using chairs and tunnels and pylons. Each student had to put on a ton of snow gear (mostly my husband's!) and climb through. They did a great job planning and leading their teams!

 

During our animal unit, we focused on Birds, Reptiles and Insects this year (we do the others next year because of the split grade). I love tying in our art lessons with our science, so we made cute Handprint birds and Nests. This was SUPER messy, but a lot of fun! The pieces that made up the nests created the most mess, but my kiddos are great sweepers and I had TWO parent volunteers that day!

We have been working on Procedural Writing (How To) this month. We put pictures in order and then wrote about them, we made sequences for stories we read and then drew the pictures, and then finally we chose one thing we knew how to do and planned, drafted edited and wrote out our How To's. They turned out so cute! This one cracked me up, coming from a Grade Two student. It explains "How To Drive a Car"!

In our Bible lessons, we have been talking about the Sermon on the Mount and we learned that God takes care of the birds and the flowers, so we know he will take care of us because he loves us even more. To remember that, the students wrote about what God provides for them and made borders of birds and flowers. They did a much better job of this than I imagined. I love the little birds on this one!

And LASTLY, we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday! This year, our school is performing six Dr. Seuss books as our Spring Play, so the whole school was pretty into his birthday.  I even came in my most festive Hat and Tie! We painted Truffula Trees (water colour paint, then we traced the outline with black markers the next day). The students also wrote about their favourite stories. It was great day!

 

Ringing In the New Year

Starting a New Year is such a great event. My students love correcting me when I say 2011, which I have at least 20 times this week!) I wanted to do a few activities that reflect on last year and look forward to next year. I started out by making a worksheet. You can download it free here.

We brainstormed together and came up with a list of things that happened last year (they struggled with the concept of "Last year" and "Last School Year"). They did the sheets individually, but I had to help out a lot of my grade ones.

I also plan to do a cute art project showing what we remember from last year. I will post pics when they are completed this week.

Lastly, we are going to make "Resolution Magnets" to remind us of the things we plan to do this year. I found the pinned the idea from Kaboose Crafts.

Happy New Year Everyone!