Summer in a Jar- End of Year Activity

I used this as a one or two day project at the end of the year for students to think about visual symbols of things they were possibly going to do over the summer. As the beginning of this school year fast approaches, I can see this being used as a start of the year activity for them to show what they actually did. It would be good for getting a quick visual assessment of where their skill levels are at.

Day 1: Started with talking about why people collect things and the kinds of things people collect. Then, we had a discussion about how we also "collect" memories and how we were going to show those memories with symbols. To practice this process, I said a variety of different activities someone could do over the summer and had them tell me a symbol for it. Before they actually started drawing I gave them the worksheet below to guide them in the brainstorming process. On one side they list the activity and on the other they write/draw how they are going to show it. The minimum number of things was seven and they were encouraged to do many more!

First graders only took one class on these while Second and Third had a second work day.

Bugs Up Close with Kindergarten

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...