The older classes are doing a more complicated version of symmetrical insects. They chose an insect or parts of an insect from a worksheet. They then drew half of the bug on one side of their paper. I had pre-measured and marked the center of their paper. After one side was drawn, they traced their […]
Both classes this week are learning about symmetry. Insects are great subjects to tie in with symmetry. Most are symmetrical. Some are beautiful. Some are scary. There’s something for everyone. In the younger class, we began by reading The Bugliest Bug, by Carol Diggory Shields. It tells the story of some sneaky arachnids that disguise […]
The new session got off to a great start this week. We started by reading Petunia by Roger Duvoisin. This is a classic story written in 1950 about a goose who finds a book and believes it has given her wisdom. This “wisdom” causes her to be proud and gets her and her animal friends […]
Since we already had beautiful painted papers and scissors and glue out for our flower collages, we used the rest of our hour together creating a bird collage. This was a quick, easy project inspired by Lois Elhert’s illustrations in Pie in the Sky. I did provide templates for those that wanted to use them, […]
For the last two weeks, my 3rd-5th grade classes worked on oil pastel birds. My inspiration for this project came from an acrylic painting class I took from Alison O’Donoghue. Alison’s technique involves many layers of acrylic paint on a wood panel and hours of work, which doesn’t work for this age group. However, I […]
This week I read Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp (by Carol Diggory Shields, illustrated by Scott Nash) to the K-2nd grade group. It’s a fun, rhyming book about dinosaurs having a party. The bright illustrations of dancing dinosaurs provided our inspiration. We drew our dinosaurs with crayons and painted them with liquid watercolor. We […]
This week almost everyone completed their winter collages. This has been a great project. Each mini lesson provided learning opportunities and a lot of fun. I loved seeing it all come together. Students had to make decisions on the placement of the elements of the their landscapes. Some added extra details and created a story […]
This week we finished drawing and began to color our forest animals. We talked about layering colors and varying pressure to achieve rich colors with colored pencils. These are really turning out great! I can wait to see our winter collage come together next week. For those that finished early, we learned how to cut […]
This week we painted a winter landscape which will be the background for our collage next week. We also drew forest animals to populate our winter scenes. Before we began our final drawings, I had students do a drawing exercise. I passed out reference pictures of the type of animals found in a winter forest […]
I love these foxes the K-2nd grade classes did over the past two weeks. I can see the cool shadows and the warm light on the snow outside my window right now. This project really captured that winter light. The foxes are adorable. One student decided to do a wolf. In this project, students learned […]
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