keep calm...

I had to laugh when I saw this on Pinterest. I NEED to find this shirt....STAT! Have a wonderful Friday!

Spooky Silhouette PDF! (FREE download!)

I have finally joined the ranks of Teachers Pay Teachers! I am thrilled to offer my first PDF download (a free one!) of my Spooky Silhouette PDF for you to use in your classroom. It is one that I get requests for even during the winter holidays and remains on the top of my all-time most-read posts.

Spooky Silhouette FREE download on TpT!

For a step-by-step of this project, you can check out my original blog post here.

Enjoy! I look forward to doing this lesson again this year...it's a favorite of my students!

Too Much Glue!

This summer I was contacted to review a book called "Too Much Glue" by  Jason Lefebvre  and I jumped at the chance! The illustrations by  Zac Retz were so adorable, and the issue of "too much glue" runs rampant in my classroom. I've blogged about it a couple of times and have yet to find an awesome permanent solution.

I digress.

Just like Matty in the book embraces his love of glue and turns it into a "masterpiece", I embraced my Kindergartners love of piling glue onto paper and had them make their own gluey masterpieces!

First, we used glue to make wiggly, squiggly, criss-crossed lines of glue (not puddles!) on our 9x12 black paper.

Next, we let them dry for 24 hours (in my case, they picked up the project again the next week since I see my kiddos once per week).

We then used oil pastel to color inside the spaces and shapes the glue lines created. Students had to be careful NOT to go beyond the glue lines (it helps that the glue stays raised on the paper. It gives kind of a "bumper" effect to help students color in the lines.

Students did a GREAT job filling up the entire masterpiece with color!

Layered Landscapes (5 Ways!)

This lesson is an oldie, but a goodie...it was actually one of my very first lessons I taught when I did my fourth graders during my internship 14 years ago! There is quite a bit of prep to this lesson, but the end result is so worth it!

There are 4 "stations" I use for this lesson, and I will explain each one under the accompanying photo.

Before you start anything, though, here are the materials you should have on hand and the papers you should pre-cut for the project!

Materials:

12x18 paper (background)

12x12 paper (layer 1)

12x9 paper (layer 2)

12x6 paper (layer 3)

12x3 paper (layer 4)

Watercolor paints

Bubble wrap

Printing ink

Rubbing Alcohol

Table Salt

Textured Rollers

Here are the materials for each station:

Station 1: Paint with any color watercolor and drop rubbing alcohol onto the wet paint.

Station 2: Paint with any colors and drop table salt onto the wet paint.

Station 3: Paint with "hot" color scheme and roll with ink and textured rollers on top.

Station 4: Paint with cool colors and use inked bubble wrap to stamp on top.

For the background, I had students use 2 cool colors and the "wet on wet" technique over the entire paper. The sun was created using some random painted paper I had in my art room.

Aren't they just SO colorful and fun?!

Splat Monsters!

This is a project I did with my First Graders and had AMAZING results! I originally saw this idea on Pinterest and decided to take it a couple of steps further.

First, we read the book "Jeremy Draws a Monster" by Peter McCarty. I love that book and have used it for several different lessons. 

Materials:

3 bottles of watered-down liquid watercolors (I like the Sax brand. It's well-priced and very brilliant!!!)

1 drinking straw for each child

Google eyes (not necessary but I had a parent donate about 2,000 of them to me!)

black crayon

The elements of creativity PDF

I started out by pouring out a small puddle of liquid watercolor paints onto each child's paper. This was the BEST way I could think of to disperse the paints and it worked well!!!

Students used a straw the blow the puddles out around the paper. They made some very interesting shapes!

We then used some google-eyes and glued them onto the colorful shapes. *Yes, I did this when the paints were wet. This helped my first graders visualize what they would be creating the following week. 

We then used the Elements of Creativity PDF and black crayon to help us draw the arms, antennae, horns, mouths, etc that would turn our monsters into some more recognizable creatures. We used the black crayon to draw a background (most kids wanted outer space or stars or a simple patterned background) and a ground. I totally dig how these monsters turned out!

 Have a MONSTER of a good time with this one! 

Shape Monsters!

This is one of my favorite Kindergarten projects that I do each year!

This is a lesson which stresses Geometric shapes-vs-Organic shapes. The complete step-by-step lesson and literary connection can be found HERE!

Happy Monday!