4th Grade 3D Snowflakes

There are quite a few tutorials on YouTube that show how to make these. Search "How to make a 3D Snowflake" and you'll find lots of them. I was surprised looking through a few of them; people tape the first fold in each flake...? I use a dab of Tacky Glue instead. You can see the tape, but not the glue.

I first saw these snowflakes years ago at one of my schools. The music teacher made them for a winter concert and I was dazzled. He sent me the directions; written and with NO pictures. Yikes! With the help of Lynn, the aide in my building, we hammered out the visuals of what the words were describing. -Didn't Rousseau draw and paint animals he never saw and were only described to him through letters from a friend? Yup, it was like that. :)

BTW: I'm trying out some watermarks on my pictures. There are so many fonts and colors I'm not sure yet what I'll finally settle on. If you have some feedback I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

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.

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.