At my school, we use Kath Murdoch’s Inquiry Cycle. Many of our staff are new the PYP and new to inquiry-based teaching and learning, so we find this inquiry cycle provides some structure to t…
I’ve noticed that mirrors are the newest trend in childcare classrooms (of course… Reggio Emilia preschool centres have been using them forever, infant classrooms have always had a mirr…
Excellent ways to provide an accessible creation station for children and lots of ways to vary art inside the classroom with a variety of materials.
I just completed a little art project with our Grade 1 students using Adobe Ideas iPad App. After reading a few Todd Parr books, Ms Kraus...
Looking to incorporate more inquiry into your English classroom? Here are some easy ways to add some elements of inquiry into your lessons.
I love scanning Pinterest for good ideas, and this round up post for Back to School offers some of my favorite ideas for Classroom Decor.
Painting on tin foil using cotton buds (Q tips) is an easy process art idea for kids. Foil painting is great for working on fine motor skills as well as colour mixing for toddlers and preschoolers. This art technique was inspired by Van Gogh's painting the starry night.
30+ of The BEST Hand and Footprint Art Ideas! Kids crafts with homemade cards, canvas, art, paintings, keepsakes using hand and foot prints!
What can we make with 10 Black Dots? QUIZLET GRADE 1 QUIZLET BASIC ART VOCAB QUIZLET ELEMENTARY ART FLASHCARDS COLOR SONGS!!! We will be discovering the Art El…
How cute is this 3D Curled Paper Ant Art? Such a lovely craft idea for little ant and insect fans this Summer.
Matching drawings, music, and emotions is a fascinating experience, which helps to express yourself and your own feeling. Is not possible to fail or to make mistakes, and the experience has always …
Kindergarten/First Grade When I begin teaching at a new school I like to start with the Elements of Art to get a foundation established bef...
Hello, friends! My kindergarten is wrapping up a self-portrait lesson and it's one that I've never done before with them. I'm super happy with the result and I wanted to share with y'all. Mostly I wanted to share some of the tips and tricks and things I learned in hopes that it may help you, if you decide to go down this rainbow/self-portrait path. But first, let's chat about where this lesson falls in my kindergarten line of projects. We start the school year in kindergarten with Line Sculptures. From there, we moved on to Dot Painting. Following this, we painted Rainbows! Now, in the past, I completed this Line Unit before moving on but the last couple of years I've mixed it up a bit. I will bounce back to those lessons but for now, we are painting. We've also not finished our rainbows (by adding the sun and clouds) but that will happen this week. My favorite supply for painting with kindergarten are tempera cakes. This is a little what my set up looks like. I always serve up paint (or have the kids get their own paint) on trays. This helps us carry the supplies easier and contain the mess incase there are spills. If you know me and my paint set up, then you know that we normally use dog dishes for water and a sponge. But sometimes we are using them for other things so this is my back up set up: water pot (these are my favorite and you can find them here, they are NO SPILL!), sponge for 'drying' our brush (sponges are called Dirty Ole Sponge Bob and I get them from the Dollar Tree) and a tray to hold the sponges (old sushi dishes!). My tempera cakes are usually a mess. You can purchase tempera cakes in a set but they always end up getting crumbly or with a big hole in the middle. The tray the cakes come in is crap and a thing plastic. I noticed huge messes of paint left on tables a couple of years ago...which was from the thing plastic tray splitting and paint leaking out the bottom! So now I NEVER order the whole tray, just the refills like I do my pan watercolor paint. I love Prang's tempera cakes as well as Jack Richesons. I order all the colors in the rainbow. I use muffin tins and plastic condiment cups to create a palette for the kids. When we are painting our skin tone, the palette is changed to have only red, orange, yellow, white, brown and black. For painting rainbows, this is how I set up the palette. We spend a LOT of time listening to this song and this song as well as learning the ASL for all of the colors in the rainbow! Then we hit the ground running and paint our rainbows. Even in 30 minutes (the length of all my art classes), I always have early finishers! So early finishers are given another sheet of paper and told to paint a rainbow pattern. We wrap those up the following art class. Hot Tip: Cut 2" off the paper that you plan to frame that way it's ready to frame on traditional size construction paper! I plan to frame these self-portraits on black construction paper 12"X18". The following art class, we learn what a self-portrait is! This video REALLY helped and we loved it! After listening, dancing and singing with the song, I demonstrated drawing a large self-portrait as the kids directed me. I asked "what should I draw first? What shape should I use? How big should I draw?" Afterward, they were given paper and a permanent marker (I wished I would have had them use a regular black marker as the line would have been thicker). They did an amazing job! The following art class, we learned all about scissor safety! And how to carry and wear our scissors correctly. Below is a video on how I explain scissor safety to my students (if you cannot see this video, try viewing this blog post from your laptop): After cutting out, kindergarten glued their selfies to their rainbow backgrounds! This is definitely a project I'll be doing again!
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE. In my last blog post, I wrote about outdoor play and encouraged early learning teachers to look beyond their fenced in playground in the hopes that children may be giv…
The DIY animal track stamps are a fun and educational project for your animal-loving kids!
Hey everyone!!! I hope everyone is having a great start to the NEW YEAR! It's always great to have a fresh start and a clean slate...
Today, I thought I would share one of the biggest resources that has ever been created for you. This post contains enough arts and crafts ideas to get you through the summer, fall, winter, spring... and many more rounds after that! I decided to have this resource include both art ideas AND craft ideas. The
Handwriting has never been easy to teach to kindergartners, but it is in the Common Core Standards that they learn how to print letters correctly. Each year I have tried through the traditional ways of working on fine motor skills the first half and then formal handwriting sheets the second half of the year. It never worked so this year I tried something new... An inquiry about lines! I asked the kids what kind of lines they knew of. At first they drew straight lines, but then started to expand the types of lines they made! We read some books and watched some videos on YouTube that showed us different lines and also gave them names. I put out provocations for them to explore lines in many different ways and see what they noticed and what connections they made. I put out invitations for them to use lines to make letters, shapes, designs, pictures and numbers: They explored! They are doing activities to build strong finger muscles to help with handwriting and explore lines at the same time! Our clay is quite hard and they have to work it to soften it up. Plus, manipulating the pipe cleaners helps work those fine motor skills! Through this simple inquiry, the kids are much more aware of the different types of lines and how to make them. They are recognizing them in letters, shapes, numbers and pictures. So far, I am seeing an improvement compared to previous years in their names as they try to form the letters the correct way. More are pulling down vertical lines rather than pulling up when making letters but for some this is a hard habit to break! We will keep working on it in developmentally appropriate ways and we will see as the year goes on if this knowledge of lines will help them with the common core standard of writing letters correctly! Here are some other things the kids have been doing in our room during this inquiry! Dots! We celebrated International Dot Day and celebrated creativity! Ken Robinson said that creativity is as important as literacy and I cannot stress enough how true that is! Employers want creative and critical thinkers so these skills need to be emphasized! Here are some pictures of some invitations to be creative and our final display of creativity! In Literacy, we have been focusing on letters and letter sounds. They have been using their names and the names of their friends to help them to recognize letters and their sounds. The invitations at the beginning of the year focused mostly on exploring letters and names. Working lavender into this play-dough also made this a great sensory experience as they used it to explore letters and try to spell their name and friends names. They have been working on the concepts of print as they learn letters and sounds through letter books. They have been practicing starting in the right place, pointing to the words and going in the right direction when they read. When they partner read, one is the reader, the other is the helper so they have to listen and watch closely, then they switch roles. In math we have been exploring numbers counting objects and matching them to the number. We also have been exploring measurement. In math we are also exploring shapes and their properties. In science, they have been working on looking closer, wondering and documenting what they notice. I set out invitations for them to explore and practice these skills. It has been a very full first month! It is amazing how far the kids have come! Stay tuned to find out what the kids are creating for our math area!
Symmetrical butterfly painting art project for kids. Use our free printable shape template to create a monarch or blue morph butterfly
Shared art can be the perfect process art activity for preschoolers. Shared art allows preschoolers to explore in a social manner that is completely process
Submerged VBS Craft Ideas - a collection of alternitive craft ideas for Lifeway's "Submerged" themed Vacation Bible school
We are gearing up for summer this week with our ocean theme. Just 2 more full weeks of Tot School then we will be switching things up for summer, and we are so ready for some fun in the sun! Here were our plans for Ocean week: And here are the details […]
All over social media, I have observed absolutely stunning alphabets, created by and with children. I am always so impressed with the beauty, passion and detail that goes into these creations. This…
Here are some creative dandelion art pieces you can make at home!
Our theme this week was "Our Five Senses" and we focused on the letter B and the shape circle. We read this week: Ferdinand by Munro Lea...
“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”-Sylvia Plath Drawing and painting with light and shadow is one of my absolute ...
This page has a lot of free printable Transportation worksheets for kids,parents and preschool teachers.
Kelso is back in ACTION at Lee Elementary! Kelso & His Friend Lily sitting atop my bookshelf Students have been begging for Kelso to come visit their classroom with me and it is finally time! Kelso is our counseling mascot at Lee, helping students solve their problems with his simple wheel of choices: Kelso's Choices is a conflict-management curriculum that teaches children that they can be problem solvers themselves. Students learn to determine small problems they can handle on independently and large problems that require an adult's help. After reintroducing him to our students and having them explain how it works (see previous post here), we were ready to create our own Kelso to help us out. I was inspired by two different bloggers, Mrs. H & The Creative Counselor, and adapted their ideas to "Kelso-ize" them. In first grade, students made their Kelso's with his mouth containing the different choices they can try to resolve conflict: In second grade, students made a problem solving lily pad for Kelso and his choices. The bottom plate had the 9 choices glued onto it and the top plate had a slice cut out for them to spin it around until they found one they wanted to try:
As the snow melts and the weather (hopefully) warms it's time to turn to our attention to baby birds hatching, flowers blooming, butterflies emerging and rainbows coming from the rainy weather. The best part is that all of these things make great kids spring crafts and are a lot of fun to do on a rainy day or a day that's still a little too cold to go outside to play. These spring crafts are all made with fun materials, many of which you most likely already have in your home. As always, we created and tested all of these crafts in our own home so we can assure you that they are all fun and child-friendly!
Hi friends! Today I want to share with you our dinosaur inquiry from the past few months! We originally had some dinosaur wonders on our February wonder chart, so we went back to those questions and I also invited students share more questions they had about dinosaurs. Here is what they came up with initially: Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? How did dinosaurs go extinct? Is it true that the dinosaurs died because it go too cold? Back then, were the dinosaurs real or was it just a story? What do dinosaurs eat? Where did dinosaurs live? Did dinosaurs live in caves? Why do dinosaurs have tails? Why did dinosaurs run? What did dinosaurs sound like? Why did dinosaurs make loud noises? They weren't brainstormed in that order, but I grouped them like that so we could look at questions that were similar consecutively. For our lessons, we first started by reading the book "What are dinosaurs?" by Bobbie Kalman. In this book we learned that dinosaurs were real but lived long ago and that no dinosaurs are alive today. After we learned this information, I had the girl who originally asked the question "Back then, were the dinosaurs real or was it just a story?" come to the teacher table during centre time and record the sentence "Dinosaurs were real but they lived long ago. There are no dinosaurs alive today." It's hard to see but it's the writing at the bottom left corner on the bulletin board! Here are two centres I put out early on in our dinosaur inquiry. First, I bought this egg at Dollarama and posed the question "What do you think will hatch out of the egg?" and had students observe and write their predictions. They loved looking for changes, especially after seeing a few cracks develop! After it hatched (it was a triceratops inside) we talked about how all dinosaurs hatch from eggs. Another centre we set out early on was this dinosaur provocation. This centre lets the students freely explore different dinosaur items and also record their observations and questions about dinosaurs. I bought the dinosaurs from Michaels. You can get the tracing/matching cards you see in the picture for FREE by clicking here on the image below: The next day, we continued to read the book "What are dinosaurs?" by Bobbie Kalman learned that dinosaurs eat plants and meat. We learned the words carnivore and herbivore. After the lesson we prepped for our next lesson by making the titles "What do dinosaurs eat?", "plants" and "meat". Then I made 2 eggs and printed the herbivore and carnivore signs. I also printed the herbivore and carnivores that were in "What are dinosaurs?" and "First Facts: Dinosaurs" by DK Publishing (that I planned to read the next day). The next day, we put the chart pieces up on the whiteboard and read the pages about what dinosaurs eat in "First Facts: Dinosaurs" by DK Publishing. As we read the book, we sorted the dinosaur cards on to the correct egg. We also went back to the "What are dinosaurs?" book and re-read the pages that had information on herbivores and carnivores ands sorted the corresponding dinosaurs on those pages as well on to the egg. Here is the finished chart: (this activity and the map activity below was inspired by @playexplorelearn on Instagram!) The next morning, I set out this invitation to sort dinosaurs based on what they eat. I left out the two books we read to make our chart the previous day as a resource and our completed chart was also on the bulletin board for them to reference! Next, we looked at the question "Why and how did dinosaurs go extinct?" First, we watched the video "Where did the dinosaurs go?" by Pink Fong on YouTube. We watched the video twice and then the students recalled the steps to me about how the dinosaurs went extinct. I wrote each step on a different whiteboard. Then at centre time, students volunteered to record the steps and draw a corresponding picture (if they wanted to) so that we could display the steps on our bulletin board. Next we explored the question "Where did dinosaurs live?" We read pages from "Dino Encyclopedia" (I can't remember the author, sorry!) and "You Can Be a Palentologist!" by Scott D. Sampson to learn that dinosaurs only lived on land (those other creatures that flew or lived in the water were flying reptiles or ocean reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs! Who knew!) but they lived on every continent. I drew up a big map on poster paper and told them that we will be painting it together and then adding dinosaur stickers to show our new learning. First, students were invited to show their new learning about the world map by painting one. If they were able to paint the map correctly (green for land, blue for ocean) then they were invited to come and paint on the large collaborative map. We projected a large world map on the projector so that students could use that as a reference when painting. Here is some of my girls adding to our collaborative map! After we painted the map, we also made labels for the continents, the title and the writing piece to show our new learning. The next day, we glued the continent labels as a class and also added the dinosaur stickers whole group. And here is the completed map and corresponding title/writing: I got the stickers we used for the collaborative map at Michaels. The next day, I also let the students add mini dinosaur stickers to their original maps! I bought the mini stickers at Walmart. I started with a limit of 10 but I realized not everyone made a map so increased the limit to 15. These tiny stickers are great for fine motor development! Here is a sample of a finished map! I had some requests to share the printable for this activity so you can click here or on the image below to download it for free! Next we investigated the question "What did dinosaurs sounds like?" We watched these two videos: and we learned that scientists think dinosaurs did not roar like they do in movies like Jurassic Park. Instead they think they made a hissing noise. Then the girl who originally asked the question came to the teacher table at centre time and wrote her new learning to display on our bulletin board. It's hard to see but it's the top right writing piece in the picture below: Another centre I put out was this story making centre! Students were invited to make a dinosaur story with play dough and loose parts and use ChatterPix to record it. They LOVED this activity! On the last day, I wrote some of the remaining questions on chart paper (Did dinosaurs live in caves? Why do dinosaurs have tails? Why do dinosaurs run?) and we used google and our own inferencing to come up with the answers. I don't have a picture of this... sorry! To consolidate our learning, we also made these non-fiction dinosaur books! This was a great guided group for my higher writers. First we made our cover page and talked about titles, authors and illustrators. Then we learned about table of contents and how it helps us find information in a non-fiction book. We wrote our learning on each page, added a title and went back and added each new topic to our table of contents. It took about a week to complete but it was worth the time! Next time I think I'll start with less pages in the book though, especially for our first book! Here are some other books in case you are interested in looking! They used our bulletin boards as a reference when thinking of facts to include in their books which made our bulletin board more interactive than usual which I loved! If you are looking for these non-fiction book making printables, you can find them in my "Inquiry Writing Templates for Kindergarten" pack on TPT. You can click here or on the image below to see what else is included! Here is the finished bulletin board again: We had some amazing questions come up during our dinosaur inquiry (see below). We recorded them but the kids were losing steam with this inquiry and our caterpillars arrived so we switched gears without exploring these questions. I just wanted to share that because it's ok to not explore every question! Don't beat yourself up if you can't find the time! We can only do what we have time for :) That's it for our dinosaur inquiry! I hope this post gave you some ideas if your students have similar wonderings or are interested in dinosaurs too! - Yukari
