Adaptive Art Snowmen

Yes it was a balmy 98 degrees yesterday, 91 degrees is expected today and I’m thinking snowmen! My Adaptive Art class made these in January. I knew this was an interesting lesson worth sharing, so I made sure I took pictures before sending them home. The heat has chased me out of the garden and into the house. It’s a good day to think cool thoughts so here we go!

I should probably note here that in the Adaptive Art class I teach with 2 support aides in the class and we work with 4 students.


This year, because of my student’s skill levels I’ve been visiting a lot of early childhood sites. The idea of using “coconut” on artwork came from one of those sites. I apologize that I’m not listing the name of the blog; if I come across it again I’ll post the site address here.
Can you see the coconut flakes glued to the snowman to simulate textured snow? It’s a great look.

Here is what we did;

Day 1:
• Students started by rolling white Crayola Model Magic into two balls. One ball is smaller than the other. The smaller ball is the head, the larger one is the body.
• As students rolled the balls I cut popsicle sticks to fit inside the snowman. The popsicle stick does not have to be pushed into the snowman all the way through, but well over half way is good.
Students stick one end of the popsicle stick into the head so it looked like a lollypop. The bottom half of the popsicle stick was then pushed into the bottom ball of the snowman.
• Have students put effort into standing the snowmen up… balance them if you can, before they leave class.
• At this point the snowmen have to dry until the next class period, but you are going to get some gluing done on them before the next class. I was not expecting this next step and was surprised when I picked one snowman up and found the head loose on the body after it dried. Before your next class with the students you will want to slide the popsicle stick out, coat it with Tacky Glue and reassemble it. You’ll want to do this as its drying or is dried so you do not alter the shapes the students have made. Give it time to dry now.
The next day see if the snowman head and body are loose where they come together in the middle. I’m guessing it will be. Give it a good shot of hot glue just to be sure it’s secure. (I was REALLY surprised that the Model Magic did not stick together by itself, but it could be because of all the handling by the students.)

Day 2:
• The next class period have students use a paint brush to paint glue all over the snowman. You can do the whole thing at once or only paint one section at a time. When you have the thick glue on the snowman, start rolling it in coconut that is poured in a bowl. If you find some bare spots add more glue and do it again. Keep going til the whole thing is covered.
Now the snowman needs to dry again. Stand or lay the snowman on a sheet of plastic and let it dry.

My adaptive students work very fast so at this point I pull out a basket that has supplies ready for another project… for example; paint the background paper for a new project and let it dry, and/or start cutting or ripping out shapes to go on the painted paper (house shapes, large petals for flowers, sailboats, geometric shapes, etc. –whatever the next lesson will be… at the end of class wet paintings go in the drying rack and paper shapes get paper clipped together and I write the student’s name on their paper shapes. )
If only a small amount of class time is left I pull out the Playdoh or get beads and pipe cleaners out, maybe draw with marker and paint the paper with water when they are done... something short but very interesting.

Day 3:
• The snowman gets completely assembled in this class; Have students match two pompoms for earmuffs, and choose a color of pipe cleaner for the top of the earmuffs. Also, students choose the color of the felt scarf they would like. (I had precut a bunch of felt strips before class.) While I am doing a quick hot gluing getting the earmuffs on, students are tying their scarves on, and then start to put their paint details on. Scarf first, paint after. Often if students put the face on first, the scarf covers a lot of it up. Get the scarf on first so they can more clearly define the space they have to work with. The eyes, mouth and buttons of the snowman are tempera paint dots. Students use the handle end of a paintbrush, dip it into black paint and place dots of paint onto their snowman.
• When all is done there is one more visit to the hot glue and we glue the snowman onto a stiff board –in this case I think it was scrap matte board. In this lesson I think I squirted hot glue under the scarf too so it couldn’t be ripped off by the students and put in their mouths.

• The paint completes the snowman. I decided not to add an orange nose or arms with pipe cleaners, etc. because I was worried that it might be something that would pull off the snowman easily and end up in the student’s mouths.

You will probably have a lot of class time left so we continue the project we started at the end of the last class.

*Will I do this lesson again? Yup, BUT I think it needs a fine tuning so the “snowballs” do not come apart when drying. I think I’ve seen popsicle sticks with notches cut out of the sides… I wonder if those notches would hold the Model Magic securely so no extra gluing is needed…?
*When making paper mache snowmen with first graders I have cut the toe area off of a small sock and students use this as the hat…(you can leave it as is or turn the sock tip inside out) a little pompom on the top finishes it off nicely. (That would avoid that hot glue earmuff step…)
*Even using fabric, with several students still working on “grasping and squeezing” their scissors, cutting their own scarf is out of reach. I wonder if there is some sparkly netting material that looks wintery. I think they could cut through netting…

Do you have any suggestions?

Adaptive Art Paper Mache Turtles

Near the end of the school year I busted out the paper mache paste one more time and introduced a turtle lesson to my Adaptive Art class.
• The armature for the turtle is a paper bowl.
• Students taped round stiff paper onto the bottom of the bowl to cover it.
• One additional step you might want is to add dried beans in the bowl before students tape it up, making sure all the edges are sealed. It would make a fun shaker.
• I made up a batch of School Smart Art Paste (see my post on it for more info… the label of the post is “Paper Mache”) and off we went!


When the turtle shell was dry, students used green Do-A-Dot to decorate the turtle shell. The Do-A-Dot comes in more colors than the box shown. We had two greens, a light and a dark, to use on the turtle shells.

The head, tail and legs made up a color mixing lesson. Students poked yellow and blue Crayola markers all over their white Model Magic and squished it together creating a green color.
We flattened the green Model Magic and covered cardboard legs, head and tail shapes. We waited until the Model Magic was dry before hot gluing them onto the turtle shell. I did the hot gluing but students watched.

When I do this lesson again I think it would be better to teach it around midyear. By the end of the school year everybody gets the wiggles. Although the paper mache really held the student’s attention pretty well, attention spans were shorter.

I’d love to make the turtles with the beans inside of them next time and work with the music teacher so the students are able to use them as musical instruments.

Adaptive Art Valentine Frames

A week before Valentine's Day I found some great wooden picture frames for ONE DOLLAR at Michael's Crafts! My Adaptive classes are very small this year so it didn't break my budget to pick a few frames up.

Day one we used rather small blown up balloons to stamp red, magenta and white tempera paint onto the wooden picture frames. When we cleaned up this part of the lesson one class rolled pink, white and purple painted marbles around on a paper and let it dry. In my other adaptive class Jason made a beautiful drawing of his mother.

Day two everyone once again LOVED peeling the backing off of sticky hearts and placed them wherever they wanted on their frames. In the marble painted paper class students cut thin strips of marble painted paper out and randomly glued them onto paper that was trimmed down and placed in the frame window. Jason's portrait was trimmed down and placed into his frame window. That is Jason's frame above. Mom is beautiful!

Adaptive Paper Plate Fish

I stumbled upon Paper Plate Fish picture and loved the simplicity of it, so I gave it a different look and changed it to meet the needs of my Adaptive Art students. I think they turned out great and there was a lot of interesting art experiences along the way.

So this is the simple fish we started with. We cut a triange out of a paper plate. The space left from the missing triangle became the fish mouth and the triangle itself was stapled opposite the mouth and became the fish tail. We got out blue and green liquid watercolors (made by recycling crayola markers -love that tip!) Students dipped their paintbrush into one color and moved it around on their paper plate then cleaned their brush and dipped into the second color. All mixing happened on the fish itself.

When the fish was painted students ripped paper for the sand in the water, green paper for plant life and shiny silver paper (which they all loved peeling the paper back off of!) as the sparkle in the water. -A bit like rainbow fish but the students loved sticking the silver paper on so much just a couple of little shiny spots wouldn't do...

Of course glitter finished the picture off. Some added a lot of glitter glue and some chose to add very little. A little painting, a little ripping and dot gluing, and a little silver paper peeling made a very engaging lesson.

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.

Adaptive Art Clay Pumpkin

In Adaptive Art we rolled out a slab of clay, cut out a pumpkin shape and drew in pumpkin sections with a pencil. They were approximately 8" high and 7" wide, give or take a little here and there. After firing the clay we mixed reds and yellow tempera paint to create orange, and painted. We ran a colored Twisteez Wire through a hole in the pumpkin stem and beaded. The beading was the favorite activity with this lesson. I am not posting the photograph of the final piece with the mod podge painted on because the glare didn't photograph well. Today was the day we gently wrapped them in newspaper and sent them home.
If I were to do this again I would have students sprinkle tiny seed beads onto the wet mod podge and do a second coat when dry. I think the texture would look interesting and feel interesting to my students.
For info on Twisteez Wire: http://twisteezwire.com/ (This is GREAT colored wire, I use it in many lessons. Check it out!)

Adaptive Art Scarecrows

I needed a short lesson for my Adaptive Art class a couple of weeks ago. We needed just a couple of minutes to complete a lesson we had invested 3 class periods in, and I didn't want to start a new, big project until the next time we met. This scarecrow lesson took 20-25 minutes to complete. I kept it simple; the shape of the scarecrow head was precut. We concentrated on identifying eyes, ears, noses and cheeks as we practiced cutting and gluing. The burlap hat was a quick fold with student help, and then I hot glued them so the folds stayed put.

I had just brought in some shape punches that morning. My students loved putting the effort into getting the paper to punch out a flower shape, although not everyone wanted to use the flowers once they had them. We'll definitely do that again, it was a good exercise in using all the muscles in their hands and arms to get the punch to work.