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!