Well we got snow yesterday in Wisconsin, so precipitation speaking it is still winter. If it makes you feel better we actually made these throughout December and January....
My high school adaptive art students vary quite a bit in ability and all ended up being successful with these projects...
Trees: This project I did with my Kinders and 1st graders and you can read about it here.
Mittens: Using a tracer they drew the mittens and then cut tissue paper and collaged it on with watered down glue. The backgrounds were painted paper with a finishing touch of white sponge painting.
They LOVED making these snowmen. We made the balls with newspaper and masking tape then attached popsicle sticks on the bottoms so they wouldn't topple over. For paper mache we used newspaper strips and only the best supply ever for paper mache...Elmer's Paper Mache Art Paste!
I only see these students for about 40 mins 3 times a week so we took 2 classes for paper mache, one for painting, and part of one for making them into real snowmen with buttons and other embellishments.
Any chance I get to make connections to the core classrooms, I do it! When I found out first grade was doing an author study of Jan Brett I knew I had to jump on the chance to do something with one of her books.
I can statement: I can draw an animal from The Mitten using simple shapes
Day 1: The classes heard Jan Brett books from their teachers reading so I was really excited when I found this version of The Mitten read by Jan Brett herself on YouTube to change it up for them...
After the video I told them we were going to change the story by making the mitten decorative instead of white and they spent the rest of the time doing a crayon resist. Drawing a mitten was challenging for my 3rd graders (like crying in frustration challenging) so I made tracers for these kiddos. They could draw whatever they wanted on their mittens in crayon and had to pick one color to do a watercolor wash in over their drawings. If time allowed they practiced drawing the different animals from the story.
Day 2: To prep for this project I found an oval and traced in in the center of a 9x12 piece of paper for each of them to use as a starting point for their drawing. I made a drawing of each animal in the story using that same oval as the base and had the oval in red and the rest of the drawing in black so they could see how it was transformed into the different animals. I will dig them out and add a picture to add to the post later. I also did a demo for each of the more challenging ones on the document camera. I knew Jan Brett's beautiful illustrations might be hard for the kiddos to translate into their own drawings so I found a clip art version of each animal that simplified them and was easy to identify an oval as the base shape.
They chose one of the animals to be inside their mitten and after they were done drawing and coloring they cut both out, glued to black paper, and added some yarn for detailing on the mitten.
I selected this one to be on display for Youth Art Month at the library and I know it will be popular given that our Wisconsin Badgers are going to dominate in March Madness....
Here are more from each building, I am so happy they choose a variety of animals so I didn't end up getting 80 bunnies...
One of the projects I saw my students have the most fun doing last year was their mono-print mitten project. I knew from that experience that I wanted to do it again this year but change it up a bit. My original post here talks more about setup and the demo.
There were just two changes I made to the project this year. I decided to forget the sketches of mittens in crayons and just had them practice drawing mittens on scratch paper before I gave them their good piece of paper. I also switched up the second portion of the lesson when I was inspired by this picture on Pinterest (that was image only so I can't give any credit).
Instead of the words like we had done when I did this project the first time...we instead cut our mittens out and made paper snowflakes and hearts to go with the display of mittens.
Obviously I had way too many when the time came to display them but it sure was a lot of fun watching them make hearts and snowflakes. I originally wanted to get up the display before Valentine's Day but I couldn't quite make it happen and it ended up going up a week later. Really happy with the way the clothes line and clothespins worked out...
