Our neighborhood

This is a great project which incorporates the beginnings of observational work for younger children. We incorporated it into a unit for first graders which was about our neighborhood and our community. It is great to take a 'field trip' walk outside if the weather is nice and have children look for buildings they're familiar with.
For this I prepped various sizes of corrugated cardboard with small slits in the bottom for stands. I also pre-cut 1" x 4" stands. Once the children chose their cardboards based on their memories ("Is the movie theatre tall? so you need a tall piece, right?") they went to town with paint. Once it was dry we added details with Sharpies and construction paper.
The best part was arranging the buildings in their proper places for a special visit by friends and family for the end of the school year! Funny, I didn't know the subway was on top of the coffee shop!

Pre-Cut Paper Collages

2.5 year old's pre-cut collage

4.5 year older siblings work

When I did this project I had 2 sisters in my class that were approx. 2 years apart in age. I only offered them square or rectangle shapes of various colors and sizes. A good part of the project was learning how to use glue sticks; taking off the caps, putting it on the back of the shape, sticking it in place. On other projects we used liquid Elmer's but with so many classrooms using glue sticks for less mess I thought it would be good to cover that.
Anyhow, look what they made! Both included lots of overlap, but look at how the 2.5 yr. old's work was smashed all the way down in the corner and her sister's was centered and spread out! What an amazing example of development!

Advanced Clay Play Pt. 3

Here's another installment in my clay series since I loove it so much and there is so much you can do with it! This is a little fella I made with some FIMO clay a pal gave me. While I'm not recommending FIMO to little ones it can be great product if used for the right project. First off, its really hard and even brand new product takes a while to soften up. I think I worked with this for 10 minutes before I was able to scuplt it into anything. It works best when sculpting by adding pieces and smoothing them on. Beads would be great too. Carving doesn't work great because its so stiff (you can see this in my feet!). It hardens beautifully and my oldest son was able to make an adorable minnow which I'll have to post here next.

Backseat Drivers Paint

Vvvvvroooooommmmm!

 14 years from now we should be scared, very scared for who is going to be out on the road...but for now, they make great painters! This class, which has evolved to be mostly boys, needed a little help getting into their painting. They tend to be stingy with their paint and rarely make any sort of mess. So I decided to try something to make them come out of their artistic shells. We took some matchbox cars, and with a little demo on how to 'drive' them through a palette of tempera they went to town. I gave my youngest artistic a toy tractor that was a little bit easier for her to handle and had some really nice treads on the wheels to make interesting prints. This would be really fun to do on a looooonngggg sheet of paper, maybe even taped up on the wall in a hallway.

Circle Prints

Beginning printmaking projects can utilize many different objects. This class had printed with sponges cut into squares, triangles, and circles. I noticed that halfway through that project they started to use the printing sponges to rub and scrub the paint onto the paper! Even with a demo showing how we stamp with sponges, I suspect it had a lot to do with the absorbent qualities of sponges. These small plastic cups (one set was quarter size, the other the size of fifty cent pieces) proved to be much better. Their work suddenly had an orderly, thoughtful quality. They even filled their pages and worked methodically. We chose blue and yellow because we had just read Leo Lionni's 'Little Blue and Little Yellow'.

Collaging with fabric

I had many small fabric scraps left from puppet making with K and 1st students. While I thought my Littles were young to be constructing puppets I decided to keep the fun part by creating a project for them in which they dressed cut out body shapes with fabric collage pieces. I pre-cut on 90 lb. paper body shapes (same shape I use for gingerbread men) and cut the scraps so they were smaller (approx. 1'x1' or 1'x2') before putting them in a tray. I gave the option of sticky glue applied with brushes or small bottles of tinted clear glue (which quickly got squirted out on our people because the color was so engaging!). Once the mess was in full swing and there was plenty of glue on our people I removed the glue and prompted them to place fabric on the gluey spots. For others I put dots of glue on their people for them to cover with 'clothes'..If my students were closer to 3.5 I would probably have had them start by coloring the face area and asking them 'Where will clothes be on our bodies?' so they would have an idea of where to cover up. I also would have used box cardboard and taped a stick on it to create a puppet for older children. For my Little Littles this was plenty of gluey fun!

Clay Play pt. 2

 After we mastered the clay ball, the clay snake, and the clay pancake we added new tools every week (week 1 molds, week 2 squeezy play doh tools, week 3 rolling pin/scissors). Finally we practiced making play doh cookies by rolling out the clay with rolling pins, cutting out shapes with large plastic cookie cutters, and peeling away the excess. We spent about four classes just playing with clay and building these skills before I made the homemade air dry clay. As you can see from the photo I also took the play doh out of its original containers and put portions the size of apricots in individual plastic containers with lids. This helped to make the clay portions easier to work with, each child got their own container, and you could see the color through the container.

Cut It Out! please

There are lots of fun projects and neat scissors out there for when your little little is ready to start cutting. I know my youngest spent hours just randomly cutting scraps. Here are a couple of 'old school' beginning scissors; the green ones are pure plastic and the orange or 'alligator' pair have a very small blade and work best for children who haven't yet mastered the action of bringing your fingers together to cut. If you've found any other clever starter scissors let me know!

Today we started with some simple exercises from the Kumon "Let's Cut Paper" book for 2's. Then we cut our own snowflakes with a little assistance. I let her do the cutting while I held the paper static, but as you can see it still turned out adorable!

Something different for Valentine's Day

I thought I would try out this project I found on with a class of 1st graders. I wanted to do more than the usual heart cutting out projects. We started on the rug, using wipe boards to lean on and following me in making our concentric circles. Many of the kids used cartoon/action movie language when describing these like "vortex" or "it should be black and white and make you dizzy" (sounds like 'Vertigo' right? lol). Tracing their hands went easily as well. It was after we moved to the tables and they got hold of the oil pastels all went awry! My original prompt to "color each separate space a separate color" led to a little confusion. When I outlined each space that WAS separate with a new color then they could see what I meant by separate...I saw the issue was making the spatial relationship clearer! They just saw the hand-not the spaces made by the hand crossing the circles!

Project found on http://josettebrouwer.edublogs.org/2012/01/30/we-heart-valentines-day-in-first-grade/

Beginning Clay Building

We love clay in our littles art group but before we start with air dry clay we have to learn some of the basics. The best way I've found is to begin with everyone's favorite play clay. After several weeks of free play we move on to some clay skills. We practice making balls by rolling with flat palms in a circular pattern. Then we use a mini rolling pins to make 'pancakes' and finish up making 'snakes' by pressing on our clay balls and rolling them with a flat palm (or 'hi' palm as I call it!). In Part 2 we'll start using cookie cutters.

Collage Pizzas!

Here's a great project that I brainstormed for my little guy's class. I had been thinking of something I could come in and do with them after they recently went on a walking field trip to a pizza parlor...their teacher tied this trip into a writing project as well so I thought I could build further on this. Trying to integrate the curriculum can actually make lesson planning easier sometimes because the search for subject matter is a given!

For this project the students talked me through the ingredients and building of a pizza while I showed them what various collaged toppings might look like. for the sauce we used cray-pas, the crusts were butcher paper and the cheese was messy shredded recycled copy paper! Each table made their own delicious, glue-y, pizza!