Third Grade Shrinky Dink Snow Globe Necklaces

The week before Christmas most the students had an extreme case of the wiggles. I set up a one day lesson with my third graders making snow globe necklaces out of Shrinky Dink.

It worked like a charm; it caught everyone’s interest, the students quickly quieted down as they concentrated on creating a design and then transferred the design onto the Shrinky Dink. (I reviewed Landscapes with the students and they brain stormed winter and holiday ideas.)
It was coloring with colored pencils from there, with highlights of silver or gold markers. All the students quietly cheered as their snow globes shrunk in the toaster oven. I had black cording precut and that sped up assembling the necklace.

5th Grade Overlapping Hands

I came across some pictures of the Square 1 Art lesson my 5th graders did last year. This was my usual "go to" lesson; the students love it and the designs all turn out with deep, rich colors.

The company has a newly designed web page and after a quick look I could not find the "Lesson Ideas" section. If I find the link I'll come back to this post and paste it in.

First Grade Fall Trees

First grade students created beautiful fall trees using a variety of materials.

A couple weeks before starting this lesson it was my luck to read Tisha’s blog post; http://tishalou.blogspot.com/2011/11/vaea-presentation-artful-power-of.html which was chock full of great book-art lesson connections. I found the book; “A tree is Nice” listed, and found it in my school library. What a great start to the lesson! It inspired some great discussions with my students.

On their white paper, students drew trees that had branches reaching out. (I did a simplified “V” tree demo.) After that we got out our crayons and considered all the colors that are on one tree. Students drew vertical lines of crayon colors on their trees.

Next up; paint shirts and watercolors. I gave a demo on mixing colors, how to clean off a color if it has a mixed color on it, and dragging the brush across the paper instead of scrubbing it on the paper.

Wow, first graders really love to paint! I went through the procedure of watercolor paint clean up and all stayed calm as everybody did their job.

Adaptive Art Q-Tip Snowflakes

With the holidays approaching it was time to start working on winter and/or holiday lessons with my Adaptive Art students, even though, oddly, there wasn’t a stitch of snow to be found in Green Bay.

I do a lot of lesson searches for my adaptive students in preschool websites as they usually a good starting point with my particular group of students. I modify all lessons because a couple of my students are still working on grasping tools and supplies.

This lesson involved squeezing a small puddle of glue onto a piece of aluminum foil and laying Q-Tips that were cut in half, around the glue creating a radial design.

When the glue dried I peeled the glue/Q-Tips off of the foil and students glued them onto some paper circles that they had glittered.

Second Grade Self Portraits

Second grade students created their self portraits by going through a number of stages and materials.

I was inspired by a lesson I found on The Incredible Art Dept. site. This particular lesson had students connect self portraits with the artist Peter Max and The Statue of Liberty. (http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/elem/selfport.htm) -You will find the lesson by scrolling down about a third of the page.
I tweaked the lesson to meet the needs of my second graders.

The second graders started this lesson by drawing a self portrait. After that, the lesson fell off the track of normal expectations as everybody used a black Sharpie marker to trace their self portrait drawing onto a sheet of transparency.

When the tracing was complete the self portraits were put aside and the tempera paint came out. Students painted the colors that reflected their personality onto a sheet of paper with lots of color mixing.

When dry, students stapled their self portrait transparency on top of their painting, mounted it onto a colored piece of construction paper and used buttons to decorate the borders.