Firetrucks!

Kindergarten has been learning about community helpers, 

they went to visit the fire station and I couldn't resist a one day painting of firetrucks. 

If you are 5 or 6 years old, the opportunity to paint a firetruck is pretty much the best day of your life. 

The chant making its way around the art room was 

"Painting is the best thing in the world!", "Yeah! Painting is the best thing in the world!".

Until one little girl intercepted with "Yeah! Painting is the best thing in the world! Except bacon!"

The response was unanimous by the rest of the class of course. 

hilarious. 

Going on a camping trip

I got the idea for the miniature campfire from a teacher at the Lab School of Washington who made these with early elementary students as part of the study of cave men.

 Instead of rocks we crumpled up small pieces of newspaper. 

The fire is made of tissue paper and we glued down pipe cleaners as the sticks.

I printed the templates on tag board and the students drew in items they would take on a camping/hiking trip and things they would see. 

Bird's nests!

Fantastic first grade bird nests on branches!

Some stuff we collected from the park:

The nests we created from all of the sticks, grass, leaves, fun nature things, (and pieces of that strange brown paper that I have oodles of from my recent bridal shower gifts):

And eggs of course!

(Model magic painted with tempera.)

The backgrounds were collaged tree branches on watercolor resist.

 The result is a bird's eye view of a nest resting on a tree branch. 

I hot glued the eggs on to the nest and the nest on to the branch image. 

 Beautiful!

Sea Turtles

This lesson was based on a popular pinterest find originally from Kristin at  ForTheLoveOfArt:

I did this lesson on CROPPING a composition with kindegarten - takes about 45 minutes total.

They came out great.

kayaks, canoes, & paddle-boards

Our P.E. teacher coordinated an "outdoors" but indoors unit. 

We had a paddleboard, canoe, and kayak for the week and the students learned about how they work and life jackets and all that jazz. 

It was awesome. 

I had them illustrate each of the different boats with the matching type of oar/paddle and include life jackets. 

They came out really cute (and accurate)!