This project was so fun to watch them create...watching their little fingers blend the flowers and listening to them dreaming up bugs was just awesome....
I Can Statements:
I Can talk about how things look bigger under a magnifying glass.
I Can draw flowers with more than two colors.
Day 1: Read them a story about a garden and bugs (cannot for the life of me remember which one). Then we watched the timelapse below of flowers growing, looked a pictures of flowers, and talked about all the colors they saw in each flower. After this chat I did a demo on the document camera of different ways to draw flowers with the oil pastels. They had to draw at least six flowers with two going off the page.
Day 2: Watched a YouTube video of bugs close up. Pretty freaky stuff. We talked about how and why things look the way they do under a magnifying glass. (DANG, I should've used real ones--that would have been awesome, next year!)
Then I gave them a piece of paper that matched the color flower they wanted to put their bug on and they drew a bug from either looking at the image below or they could make up a bug.
I gave them a piece of black paper that had a magnifying glass already traced on it to cut out and glue their bug on. These turned out pretty ridiculously cute.
This second day had a lot of time left so we did an extension of drawing a jar full of bugs interacting with the jar. I like the idea of this being a project next year...
After my second graders finished up this project, they kept busy with this mini drawing project that they took with them at the end of art that day....
The only instruction given was to make a flower come "alive" by making it do a human activity. They could keep them in the ground or in flower pots/vases and were allowed to use circle tracers if they wanted to. There was some excellent collaboration among peers by making their flowers interact with each other. They really got excited about this mini project!
Needed a sub one day last week and this was the lesson I had my sub do with my K-2 students while my older students (3-6) did complete the drawing sheets. Here is the lesson I left for the sub...a brain child/lesson of my own creation, no Pinterest needed! Go me! Maybe a little inspiration from Alice...
Disney's Alice in Wonderland
Expression Flower Faces
Have a discussion about Emotions and Expressions and how what we feel can usually be seen by others because of what our faces look like. Then list 10 or so different emotions and have them act out/show that expression to you. Remind them they should be just SHOWING and not using sound.
HappySadExcitedAngrySuprisedScaredSickSomeone who just got a complimentSomeone who just won a million dollars**Anymore you can think of**
Then for work time hand out a circle tracer to each student and have them trace a circle 4-6 times and draw just a face showing an emotion. Let them know they will be turning these into something so they shouldn’t do anything outside the circles. Show them my example with just the faces.
When the first student finishes you can reveal to them what they are going to be doing with those faces. They will be creating flower people out of them for spring! You can then show them my example with the circles turned into flowers. Feel free to hang it up on the board. Each circle should have petals, stem, leaves, and be interacting with the other flower people and be growing out of either the ground or a flower pot. They can use sharpies for outlining faces and crayons/colored pencils/or markers to color the rest.
My Example
From Kindergarten
From 1st Grade
From 2nd Grade
Big fan of this project, I may have to do it as a real project next year :)
The last few projects I have been trying out doing an extension for early finishers (instead of "free art"), it usually fits the theme of the project that we just finished and is a basic drawing/coloring on cheap paper.... 1st grade just finished their variety flower gardens so in keeping with the theme of flowers they did drawings of "flowers" that were objects instead of real flowers. Great ideas came out of this. Potentially a drawing project that I can adapt (like big time) for older kiddos.
At the beginning of the year I sent a letter out to families talking about who I was, my philosophy, and things they could donate. Donations came pouring in pretty consistently after that. I now have more toilet paper rolls than I know what to do with! One of the other items that I got an overload of was cereal boxes. In search of something to do with them I stumbled upon this great project via this post on pinterest. Per usual, I wanted to change it up and and teach a concept with it. A bonus of this project was that they were currently learning about flowers and flower parts in their classroom. Complete coincidence but I loved it! Would love if it happened more on purpose!
I CAN statement: I CAN create a variety of flowers using oil pastels.
Day 1: Started the class talking about variety. What does variety look like? Why would an artist use it? Etc. Then I showed them this image that I stumbled upon while looking for resources for this project. It was a great example of all the different possibilities of flowers including sizes and colors.
After we looked at these I did a demonstration of how to do three different flowers but explained they were not limited to the ones I showed them. For the flowers we were using oil pastels, so in my demonstration I showed them how they could blend colors for the flowers. There was a lot of excitement during that part of the demo :) The only requirement was 10 DIFFERENT flowers so we had the most variety. They did them without pencil and filled a page with them like my example below. Before they started working they had to finish part of their previous project so they were working for the entire class.
Day 2: Showed them the above image once again and asked what variety meant. A lot did not remember the word, but remembered what it meant. Woohoo! We looked closely at my example and talked about constructing the "garden". Flowers should hang off the top and could overlap and each should have a piece of string for the stems. They continued making flowers and after 10 were done they had to cut them out removing all the white space and then assembled them. Cereal boxes were cut into thirds and one side of the box was used so it could stand open. We pre-painted the boxes for students to save time because we were getting close to the end of the year but I would have them paint them themselves on the first day we started.
Make sense now?
Day 3: One more work day was needed for many students so while they were working on finishing they had an extension project of drawing made up object flowers. I will share some images of those images later ;)
One of my 1st grades was a lot more behind than the others and I use YouTube videos as a reward with them so I ended up finding this after we were done with the other classes. Wish I would of found it sooner and shown it to the other classes. SO COOL.
Very happy with how these turned out. If we were not so close to the end of the year and had more time, I would of liked to see a little more time taken drawing the coloring the flowers and I should of done some color concepts for blending but overall it was a success in my book. Also, really fun to display, especially with the Kindergarten Recycled Flowers :)
As mentioned in an earlier post about Green Art, I LOVE Earth Day. Kindergartners made these beautiful flowers out of all recycled materials. I did this project previously during my long term sub job and they turned out a little better with them because I took two classes just to paint (I saw them twice a week) but I still love how they turned out. I got the original idea from this post via pinterest but per usual turned it into my own thang! The picture below is from the first time I did the project and did two days of painting. You can see how much stronger they are with more painted colors.
No I CAN statement was posted for the project because I don't post them for kindergarten but my objective was for them to create a flower using only recycled materials. Some didn't end up looking like flowers, so I guess I had some that did not meet the objective....(and I thought it was too simple of an objective!)
Day 1: Started a discussion by asking students if they knew what holidays were in April. Easter is always the first guess but eventually I give them enough clues or someone actually knows that Earth Day is in April too. I make the comparison of taking care of the earth like families take care of their kids and then it all starts to make sense to them :) I found this GREAT YouTube video to show them too. BE CAREFUL. ITS CATCHY!
After the video we talked a little bit more about what they saw in the video and then I showed them my example of what we were going to be making. They had to guess what all the recycled materials were that I used. The rest of the time was spent using watercolors to paint a full sheet of newspaper. The idea was to just cover it in paint, however, some of my more artistic kiddos needed more control and actually created designs and patterns (but most loved just being messy about it!). I split the classroom into half warm colors and half cool colors and explained that if they stayed with one set they would mix really well and get new pretty colors and if they used both they would get browns and colors they probably didn't want. I really liked separating into two groups like this, I think it is important to change up the classroom sometimes and not have them sit in their usual seats, it provides enough of a level of excitement to keep them more engaged. Some got tired of painting so I made it more interesting by making them go "hyper speed" or "slow motion" every now again. Again, that extra excitement can be really engaging for them. Best part about this is they can be stacked on top of each other, cool in one pile, warm in the other and they will dry, so my drying rack doesn't get full!
Day 2: Watched the video again as a reminder to what we were working on. Then, because I wanted more color on the newspaper but did not want to paint for another class, we used texture rubbings to add more "umph" to our newspapers. Did this for about 15 minutes and then as a group we folded our newspapers back up and into a rectangle. On their own, they drew petals and cut them out and glued them to a small piece of square cardboard. I showed them how to overlap and glue the petals around in a circle to make them more realistic. Last step was to choose a cap to be hot glued as the center of the flower.
Really happy with this project once and glad we did the additional crayons. Some still could of used more color, might end up doing two days of painting with another activity built in just to make sure they are more vibrant.
They got displayed with a project that 1st grade did that I will be posting on shortly...
