Big! Vertical! Snowmen! (2015)

Great news! This is the last winter project I have to share with you. Hopefully that actually means we will finally get spring around here! I created these with Kindergarten and 1st but it would be a great way to explore using paper in a 3 dimensional way with slightly older kids.

I have done this project previously and written about it here and here. But I changed it up this year with materials and adding another concept.

I Can create a vertical snowman that takes up most of my paper.
I Can add something 3D to my snowman.
I Can tell you what 3D means.

Day 1: Kicked off with one of my favorite books called Snowmen All Year (it comes from a series of other beautifully illustrated snowmen books).

Then we got into the same discussion as usual with this project about vertical vs horizontal. To reinforce, I had a variety of images and flipped through them and they had to show me with their arm if they thought the subject of the image was vertical or horizontal. This was really fun and silly. Especially because I tried to find some more creative images like this one...

After my demo video they were ready to work. They drew the snowman with a white crayon first then filled it in with white tempera.

Keep in mind these are pretty big each one is 1/3 of a piece of poster board....

Day 2: Instead of a story we watched one of my FAVORITE animations and talked about what the animation was trying to teach us...

Then we dived into talking about 2D vs 3D. Both the concept of vertical vs horizontal and 2D vs 3D is easy for the littles to understand but remembering the vocabulary always seems to stump them. After my video demo and them watching me make a cup for my snowmen only like 100 times they got to work!

Day 3: A little more work time was needed for a good chunk of students but not an entire class.

I did a little experimenting this time with giving some extra supplies like oil pastels and funky scissors to some classes but not all. If I do this project again I think I will give more choice in materials and allow for any combination of them. 

Adaptive Art Winter Art!

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.

Winter Landscape Windows with 1st Grade

This was a project from last winter that worked really well visually and interactively so I wanted to do it again this year....

Here is the link to the original, more detailed, lesson with the inspiration source.

I can statement: I can talk about and create a winter landscape

I did switch it up slightly from the original lesson by making it more about landscape than exterior/interior and dropping the worksheet. The only other change was giving a few different options for creating the window frame because some kiddos had a hard time with having to "cover" parts of their artwork. It was good practice for me to listen to my students wants and make appropriate changes. Maybe this is me dipping my baby toe in the choice based pool by letting go! I've got a LONG way to go before I cannon ball in!

We read the book Snow Party to get the lesson going which was filled with beautiful examples of Winter Landscapes and explored some different photographs and illustrations of winter landscapes to talk about the features of a landscape. The rest of the project was the same as the original.

These were displayed with Kindergarten's Winter Houses that I will be sharing soon!

Jefferson Elementary...

McDill Elementary...

"Ms Lapin, It is a snow shoe hare, not a bunny"

Now was the final product the kids made a landscape? I'm still trying to figure that out. In a first grade world I'll say yes. What do you think?

Vertical Snowmen with Kindergarten

This is another repeat winter project from last year that had a few changes... I wanted to teach the same concept of vertical and horizontal to Kindergarten but I didn't feel the need to do the second artwork like I did the first time around. Here is the original project here with a link to the projects inspiration...

I Can statement: I can identify horizontal and vertical directions

Day 1: Started with one of my favorite snowman books Snowmen at Night and then talked about how in a lot of our projects I ask them to put their papers one way or another and how there was very specific words for those directions. After some arm movements, call and response, and silly quizzing with my arms... I showed them the paper that they were going to be using and how it would work perfect vertically for our snowmen. Last year I had some issues with snowmen not taking up the whole paper so we tried something a little different this year by drawing them top down. To my surprise it totally worked! Wahoo! We drew in white crayon then painted with white paint.

Day 2: I was very impressed when many of them remembered the words vertical and horizontal with a little first sound prompting and arm directions from me. Read a new book (new to me!) called All You Need for A Snowman.  SUPER CUTE. Then we flipped through pictures on the computer of a bunch of snowmen and did some compare and contrasting before talking about all the possibilities of things that their snowmen could be wearing. The rest of the time was theirs to add details to their snowmen with oil pastels...

Oh yeah, and check out this E-mail I got from a parent while doing this project--

Hi!  My name is ----------.  My daughter ---- is in Mrs. ------'s kindergarten class at McDill.  I just wanted to tell you that my husband and I were blown away yesterday when he was explaining how to write something to ---- and she said "Oh!  Just do it vertical?"  Ummm......what?????  Did my 5 year old just say and understand the word "vertical?"  When we asked ------ where she learned the word, she said very matter-of-factly "Art."  So, thank you for doing a great job teaching -----.  Art is her favorite class and we are blown away with what she is learning from you.

#WINNING

McDill Elementary.....

Jefferson Elementary....

Snowmen at Night with 3rd Grade

This project gets the most compliments (by far!) when on display in the halls. My guess is because of the quality of chalk and the overall success that is had by students. I did this project last year exactly the same way... for the original, more detailed, post check it out here. 

This is one of the ones that floats all over Pinterest in the winter so unfortunately I cannot take any credit for it. And if you have not read the Snowmen series by Caralyn and Mark Buehner, you do not know what you are missing!

For our project and purpose of talking about shadows we read and observed the illustrations in Snowmen at Night.

I can statement: I can add shadows and shading correctly to a snowman using chalk.

McDill Elementary...

Jefferson Elementary...