1st Grade: Painted Paper for V-Day

There is something so amazing about giving little kids a big paintbrush and a bunch of paint and just letting them go to town!  What they come up with is so genuine, innovative, and just wonderful!  They jump right in...imagine giving a room full of adults the same things- they wouldn't know what to do, or where to begin! :)  For this day of painting I hand out palettes of red, pink, purple, black and white tempera, and had them choose paper from dark red, red, hot pink, light pink, purple, lavender, and magenta.  They do not get water to rinse off their brush as they work- they can just wipe it off on their placemat if it gets too messy.  I show them how to create tints and shades and teach them new names for colors, which they love (red + white= rose, red + black= maroon, purple + white = lavender, purple + black= plum, pink + white = bubblegum. and pink + black = raspberry)  We will be using this painted paper to make another project, but I'm almost tempted not to!

4th Grade: First Time Weaving!!!

All in all, it was pretty successful once we got rollin'! I showed them the video that everyone suggested, and you all were right- they LOVED it! :)  In the end, we just cut our strings loose and tied them together.  I had them pick out a background color of construction paper and they glued the weaving right onto the paper, then I staple mounted them to some white tagboard.  This was a 3-4 week lesson, and all of the kids had fun doing something different than the usual drawing/painting/collaging we usually do.  Every other grade level kept commenting on them when they saw them in the artroom ("when do we get to do that?")... :D

2nd Grade: Winter Trees

This is a twist of the lesson "abstract winter trees" shown by several bloggers out there.  We started with tissue paper and glue soup (water and glue mixture) to create some colorful paper. Once that was dry we drew various triangles on the back (white side) and cut them out.  We added a snowy foreground by drawing a wavy line across white paper and cutting it out.  Pre-cut tree trunks were glued on top of the snow, then the triangular trees, and last but not least, some sparkle added on top.