Are you looking for a fun art project that your students will definitely be excited about? Create a COLORED SAND PAINTING! Kids love the tactile experience of touching the sand and the bright colors are so appealing. Using sand is a novel experience and kids have fond associations with playing in sand boxes or on beaches. Today I am going to show you an easy way to create beautiful sand paintings using paints, Elmer’s glue and colored sand. My students … Read more…
One of the best parts about lesson planning and blogging is the ability to get all sorts of new ideas quickly on the Internet. This was a fun lesson I saw first on The Busy Librarian. We read the book The Dot and the students received papers with their first initial drawn in pencil. The students then used crayons to draw dots and circles on their initial. Using watercolor paints, they painted dots and circles and made marks in the … Read more…
I saw this super cute lesson on Hannah’s Art Club and I just loved it. My kindergartners have a whole “teddy bear” unit where they read books about bears, do related activities and have a teddy bear picnic (they all bring in their favorite teddy bear to attend the picnic.) At the beginning of the year, simply cutting out pieces, gluing them and following directions is a huge challenge for 5 and 6 year olds. This project introduced creating texture … Read more…
Have you heard of the artist Shinique Smith? I just love her artwork! It’s very gestural, colorful and it just draws me in to look at more closely. I love the use of fabric with graffiti-like painted marks. Her art combines traditional art media with non-traditional materials like clothing and stuffed animals. She is influenced by street graffiti and Japanese calligraphy. She works in paintings, drawings, installations, wrapped bundles, sculptures and videos. There was an exhibit of her artwork in … Read more…
Summer is the perfect time to create art with your child. Nature provides endless inspiration for art. Here are three fun art activities using leaves that you can do with kids or just on your own! This post was created as part of the Elmer’s Crafty Bloggers team. Learning Activity Topic: Using nature to inspire art Educational Foundation: 1. Identifying and sorting items from nature 2. Using shapes and variety to create a composition 3. Learning about negative and positive … Read more…
My third graders ended the school year learning a little about the symbolism of the sun in Mexican pottery. The sun has been used as a symbol of the life-giving energy and of good luck. Cassie Stephens has a very good Prezi here about Metepec, Mexico. To make these colorful, sunny pictures we started by tracing a circle shape for the face of the sun. Then we designed our faces with unique facial expressions, rays and other designs. We talked … Read more…
I am so proud of how well my first graders drew these beautiful birds and I’m excited to share them with you. We started by reading the beautiful book The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon. This book is a wonderful connection to science as Audubon was a fascinating man who studied the migration of birds and painted them. Your budding scientists will love this story. The students looked at reference photos of birds from books. … Read more…
