Art Centers!

After finishing a project, I usually let students play in art centers. They LOVE the art centers. I have blocks for building and making designs on the carpet, stamps, textures, art matching game, shapes classify and sort, drawing books, free draw, letters to soldiers and kid's magazines for the younger students. For the older students, they may choose from dry erase boards, journal writing, drawing books, free draw, drawing a masterpiece (a remake of a already famous piece of artwork), color sorts of warm, cool, primary, secondary colors. I also have a book center for all ages.

Here are some pictures of my kindergartners yesterday after they finished their pumpkin project.

Coloring pages

Geometric Shapes

Shape Stamps

Art Matching Game

Texture Plates

P.S. Aeropostale T-shirt contest!

A few weeks ago, I received a big box of paper t-shirts from the clothing store P.S. Aeropostale. They have a t-shirt design competition every year for the past 3 years! I decided to participate and this is what my students have been doing with it!

First, we watched the short videos of last years winners and the year before's. Next, we brained-stormed "What Makes You Smile?" on the board (that's the theme) using a concept map to give students ideas. After that, students sketched a few different designs on sketch paper and then they transferred their favorite design onto their t-shirt provided from Aeropostale! They really liked this project!

The pictures below are of my 1st graders! I'm letting 1-5 do this project.
More pictures to come of the rest of the grades soon! :)

Kindergarten Night-Time pumpkins

These turned out so well!! I followed Deep Space Sparkle's lesson almost exactly. Check it out!

3rd Grade Chalk Pastel Spiders!

I love this lesson!! :) With this lesson, I incorporated art, science, reading, and writing.

My 3rd graders had sooo much fun with this one! It took about two days to finish. I saw this project on Pink and Green Mama. I followed it almost exactly only I let my kids pick any color for the spider webs.

On day one, we learned about spiders. I showed them a short youtube video, Spider facts. Then we drew a spider with a pencil onto a black piece of construction paper. They could draw as many as they liked but I told them not to make them too small. I had some visuals on their tables so that they could see what a spider actually looked like. I found a really great resource online that I was able to print off the anatomy so that they could see all the pieces and what they were called.  After they drew the spider, they outlined and filled it in with white glue. I showed them how to do this so that they would get too much glue. You have to be careful or the legs will run together. This needs to dry for 24-48 hours before you move onto the next step of the project. The glue will dry clear. You can see in the pictures how the glue is about half way dried when I took the picture.

When they were finished with that, I had them write 3-5 good sentences about what they learned about spiders.

Day two: On day two, we used chalk pastels to create the diagonal lines of the spider web and added color inside the pie pieces. They used a tissue or their fingers to spear the chalk pastels.

Next I asked them to draw the complete web with chalk pastel again. Including the curved lines that go around the diagonal lines. Ofcourse, I demonstrated this for them. After that, you can use a tissue or a damp sponge to wipe off any chalk from your spider.