Henri Rousseau got his start painting professionally late in life. He once said he had “no teacher other than nature”. Taking a page from his book and the beauty that is New England fall, Big M (age 4), Lil’ M (age 2), and I decided to engage in a little…
Turn crumpled pieces of paper into colorful artwork in this fun art project for kids. This easy art activity is inspired by the children’s book, Ish, by Peter H. Reynolds! The colorful paper has such a cool texture when finished and can be used for making collages or writing notes! (This post contains affiliate links.) …
String paint art is SO PRETTY and it's really simple to create! This is such a fun and easy art technique and a great art project for people of all skill levels. You can make pull string art with any kind of acrylic paint and either string or yarn. Pull String Art With Acrylic Paint String paint art using acrylic paint is a great art project for kids, tweens, teens, adults and seniors! I love how bright and bold the acrylic paint looks on the black paper. This is such a pretty art technique - and it's SO EASY! We
Incorporate art into literacy by reading this fun art book and then follow it with our paper people chain activity. Think red!
SUPPLIES NEEDED 12" x 18" box tops or aluminum cooking pans 12" x 18" paper paints marble forks Introduce students to the work of Jackson ...
Wax Paper Printmaking- Painting Process Art For Kids. Explore a simple form of printmaking using materials you have on hand. Fun and easy painting activity for preschoolers, kindergartners, or elementary kids.
What is Community? This year's JK-Sk class spent the first part of the school year exploring the concept of community and all it entails. Community has always been part of our school life. More that just a place to live it is a place of people, voices, shared space, rituals and customs. Coming form the Latin term meaning "with gifts" the term suggests a general sense of humanity, reciprocity and a shared practice of doing good for others that comes from working together for a joint purpose. Communities help generate a shared language, rituals and customs, and a collective memory of those that join the group. www.learnactivity.com/community.htlm If we give credence to the old African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child” then we can understand the impact that community has in helping us raise our children. Children need more that just supportive parents. As they branch outside the home they require a larger support network to grow into healthy citizens. It is a child’s right to expect the community to provide them safe neighbourhoods, adults who are good role models and dedicated teachers and politicians who keep children's rights at the forefront. When children feel a connectivity to their community they are more apt to develop a sense of civic and social responsibility. They build trust, learn to resolve conflicts peacefully and have a genuine sense of caring for others. Here is a peek at some of the children's work. The entire project is too long to post so we welcome questions. What is community. ~There are lots of houses and tall buildings. ~A community is a place where you walk to. ~There are streets. There are apartments. The Places in Our Community Our Customs and Rituals Community Celebrations Global Responsibility What we bring to the Community
Day sixteen of our Stay at Home, Screen Free Activities Programme is all about cool things to do with a big roll of paper. Cool things to do with a big roll of paper One of my daughters favourite things to do is roll out a BIG sheet of paper. There’s something about the scale which […]
Made at Viget Labs
All year, ever since the beginning, I noticed that the students enjoyed creating things such as inclined planes, wheel and axels, and levers in the forms of ramps, catapults and creatve vehicles. I told them these were called simple machines and that I had noticed they were very interested in them! When I asked if they would like to dig deeper and inquire about simple machines, they were very excited! We already have a good supply of materials for engineering, but I set out some different materials for them to explore. They were very excited to explore and see what they noticed! I cannot tell you how many times these kids failed, problem solved, failed again, collaborated, failed and persisted as they explored ways to create and use simple machines! They truly learned to look at failure as a positive learning experience in order to help them figure out why something didn't work and how they could change it and try again! Look at the excitement at the end of the video below of the children when one of their friends was finally successful after many design changes! During an investigation of Inclined planes we created a challenge. They had to create an inclined plane that would roll the cylinder right to the end of the ribbon. They observed each other and used what they noticed to adjust the board and see if they could do it. Look at how excited they got when a friend finally did it! They noticed that the cylinder went faster or slower depending on the angle of the inclined plane! This brought up a question. We have been discussing the terms "effort," "force" and "load." They learned that simple machines helped us use less effort. They learned effort was force and there were two kinds of force: push and pull...but no one pushed or pulled the cylinder down the ramp! This brought up the discussion of gravity being a force that pulls! They applied this knowledge and commented often about it as they created and played with lego and geoboard marble mazes. They also explored the force of gravity and inclined planes by creating marble paintings and drip paintings! I love combining art and science! They developed an interest in Rube Goldburg Machines! They noticed when observing videos that sometimes the balls went up ramps and wondered how since they felt gravity wouldn't allow that! They explored this concept and took it as a challenge. They created new ramps to figure it out and found out that the force of push could be stronger than the pulling force of gravity on the ball. They tried creating Rube Goldburg Machines. These machines are a chain of events that do something for you. They really had to problem solve to make these work! The video below shows one one of many that were created. It was supposed to knock over the blocks at the end, but she still had some problem solving to do! The amount of dedication, problem solving, persistence, collaboration, and grit that these kids have shown during this inquiry has amazed me! These kids have these 21st Century Skills and are using them constantly! The kids have picked a simple machine to become an expert in and are hunting for simple machines around our school. Their next steps are to organize their data and then create their simple machine! We are hoping to do an open house or presentation to show our simple machines to other classes and parents, but with Spring Break and conferences coming up I know that will be difficult! We will try our best!
In 1971 filmmaker Han Van Gelder captured the artistic process of M.C. Escher in the 20 minute documentary "Adventures in Perception".
September activity plans, summer bucket list ideas, things to do with kids in September activity plans, summer screen free play ideas
Kid's can recreate Van Gogh's masterpiece with this fun and fascinating melted crayon art project! Learn how to do it here!
I know I promised I’d be doing a lot more crafting for the non crafty moms out there, which I will! But I’ll also be sharing some crafty favorites like these self-portrait shadow boxes because they are just so cool I can’t resist. Plus, if you read my last post about paint mixing, I said […]
Aeolus character design process! (disclaimer: my writing sucks and I'm not good at explaining things so if it gets a bit weird just know I'm trying my best) a lot of people have been saying very ni…
How to make theraputty for occupational therapy to improve fine motor skills and hand strength.
What is the colour of rain? Give these printable art prompts to children along with watercolour paints and find out! A fun rainy day art project for kids.
This is a fun project for any art class! This simple & cool idea comes with easy to follow step by step instructions, photos and materials list included. Perfect for grades K-8
EASY CREPE PAPER CANVAS ART WITH KIDS
Learn from Hans Holbein's paintings and the techniques he used to create his celebrated portrait paintings and drawings! Apply his techniques to your work.
Kids love creating with watercolors, so they will love this art lesson . Joan Miro Watercolor art for Kids is a fun lesson that can be done with your kids at home or in the
There is a short list of items every teacher considers essential to running his preschool classroom and on mine, right near the top, is white glue – gallons of the stuff. Typically we order 6 gallons to start the year, knowing that we’ll likely have to place a second order sometime around late winter. While most of us think of glue as a means to an artistic end, un-indoctrinated preschoolers approach white glue as an art medium all by itself (much the way they do tape). We do dozens of collage projects in class using all sorts of exciting materials (e.g., carpet squares, feathers, spare marker caps, small metal parts from machines we’ve disemboweled) but inevitably there are a half-dozen or more finished pieces that are nothing more than a pool of glue overrunning a piece of cardboard. Usually, these pieces are stuck so firmly to our drying shelves that I have to use a screwdriver to pry them off. Often they’ve dripped through onto the art of others. Sometimes they take the whole week to fully dry. Man, that drove me crazy as a beginning teacher. “Don’t you want to put something in all that glue?” I’d ask, but as I’ve learned to give up my agenda in favor of the children’s, I’ve just started ordering more glue. And why not? As an art medium it costs less than half of what tempera paint costs, and while clean up is a bit more of a challenge than paint, it’s still water soluble, at least while it’s wet. Where I once saw waste, I now see beauty. And it’s the greatest beauty of all; it’s that look of meditation or concentration that settles over the face of a child as she systematically empties bottle after bottle of glue onto a target of some kind. It's clearly a scientific exploration into the physics of viscosity, gravity, and squirt bottles. Or maybe it's part of a spiritual journey, judging from the look of tranquility on some of their faces. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that some kids are driven to it and far be it from me to tell them when to stop. I love how earnestly they hold up their empty bottle to declare, “I need more glue.” And I love even more that we hand him another full bottle. An adult could stand there over a child’s shoulder, I suppose, and give instructions on the “proper” use of glue, stopping him after those few essential drops, but I’ve found it far more satisfying to just let kids get there on their own – and they always do, eventually. But first we have to let them get it out of their systems. One way we do this are our ongoing group, glue collage projects. Parents have come to refer to this as the “glue table,” although it is technically our Do-It-Yourself Table. I have an enormous collection of what was formerly referred to as garbage that we use for these projects. Here is one we are working on right now: We’ve been adding to this piece since the second week of school; not every day, but frequently enough that the glue bottle emptiers among us are getting their fill. As you can see, we’ve decided to start adding glitter – you know, for the holidays – and it will take a ton of glue if we’re going to encase the whole thing. We usually keep these projects around for several months, bringing them out until they attract no customers, then they get pitched. Although, here’s one that’s been hanging on our wall for the last 3 years: That particular class of kids really grew to treasure their group project and were one day talking about wanting to paint the whole thing gold. That evening I gave it a coat of metallic gold spray paint and put it by the front door for the kids to see as they entered. As they arrived, each and every one of them said, “Look mom! It turned gold!” (Note: Many of you have asked for a photo of our volcano. I'll try to remember to take one today and post it here tomorrow.) -->
Spray bottle painting is a fun refreshing way to create art, and everyone in the family can get involved!
As an interest based learning teacher, I usually start out with something most children have some experience and interest in until I get to know them better. Color is something they always enjoy exploring! I set out paint at the easel and asked, what can you wonder and discover about color here? As they explore, I constantly model for them the growth mindset, language and vocabulary often used in an inquiry based classroom: What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder? What do you notice? What did you discover? Did you learn something new? Did this change your thinking? These are questions I want them to ask themselves as they explore new things this year! I set up experiences for them to explore colors. They quickly on their own started focusing mostly on different shades of colors. Here are some pictures showing the invitations to explore and the children exploring and discovering things about color. They were also noticing shades of colors of objects in our room! When they discovered them, they would share what they noticed with the class. They noticed we could mix colors to make different shades of colors and that adding white made lighter shades and black or darker colors mixed in made darker shades. I wondered out loud if it was possible to create 100 different shades of colors? We looked at a book called Pantone Coors that you see in many of these pictures that showed there were lots of shades! The kids took it as a challenge and a project was born! We wanted to see if we could create 100 different shades! We did one color each day. We did it! Not only did we make 100 different shades, we made 120 different shades of colors! They were so excited to beat their goal and create that many colors! They also discovered that black was black but we could make different whites! I told them that I wanted to display their colors to show people what what they learned. We debated how to display them. Group them by colors separately? Group them by light or dark? Like a rainbow? I thought they would prefer that one but they surprised me. They agreed on a circle with all of the color together. I couldn’t fit the browns and grays/white/black in so those were separate. The kids helped label and write out some of the things we did and noticed for our display to document our learning. Here is the finished display! This was a fun way to get started with how we will learn in our classroom! As they learn more about letters/sounds and writing they will be recording their own observations of what they see, think, wonder and discover! As the year goes on, you will notice them using their writing and reading skills more and more in natural, authentic ways! This is one of our big goals! Now that we have finished, I have started to notice some common interests to start our next inquiry and take all of our learning further! Stay tuned! Here are some other things that have been going on in our classroom! Learning to identify letters and sounds. We start the year learning one letter a day through our Journeys curriculum and how to write the capital letter properly using our Handwriting without tears curriculum. Here are some of the experiences set out for them during this time. The kids have learned how to partner read with letter books contains predictable text. They are learning letters, letter sounds, and the first three reading strategies: 1) Use your pointer finger to touch each word. 2) Look at the picture. It is a clue to figure out harder words. 3) Look at the first letter and say it’s sound when trying to figure out a word you don’t know. They are also learning to help each other and encourage each other as they read together. Here they try to create the letter by putting the lines down in the order they should make them when writing. Here, if they can name the letter and/sound, they are allowed to use it to build a castle. Of course they can ask friends for help if they don’t know it! More ways to practice proper formation of letters and develop fine motor skills to help with writing. Pebble crayons to encourage their pincher grip, texture to feel themselves making the letter on both the the grid and the chalkboard (both provide resistance. A whiteboard does not so does not work as well. We learned about Mat Man to help us with drawing people. We draw his parts and then add details to turn him into somebody. We keep writing at a minimum for now so that we don’t continue the bad writing habits they have developed. We focus on creating stories through pictures and telling oral stories. We read these books to help us. It helped us realize if we don’t know how to draw something, we can draw it “ish!” Dog-ish, violin-ish, etc. it gives them the freedom to try and helps those perfectionists not throw away every drawing they don't feel is perfect. We also read Beautiful Oops and Oomph! These taught us to work through mistakes and to add the destabilization a picture needs to tell a story in itself! These books really helped them learn to tell stories through pictures. Good Dog Carl is a good example of a story told through pictures. A lot of literacy learning has been happening and it’s only just beginning!
Grief and worry can often leave young people feeling all alone and isolated. The Shield of Strength is a fun craft and activity to get kids thinking about their own assets and other people in their lives that can be there to help them when they need it the most. You can click on the picture above to get a downloadable template for the Shield of Strength as well as the instructions.Here's how it works: Draw a shield pattern like the one above on a large piece of cardboard or poster board. Divide the shield into four sections by drawing a horizontal and vertical line. Label the four quadrants as “Family,” “Friends,” “Skills” and “Others.” Cut the shield out. Write people or skills/abilities in each section that can help to protect you or help you feel better when you’re feeling down. Keep the shield as a reminder that you are never alone in the struggles and difficulties that you face. Instead of making a large shield, you can use the template on the following page to create a smaller version.
These sensory stations are free sensory path printables with a Spring theme. Use them in sensory walks at home or in the classroom.
Laurel Burch was an artist who fought through adversities & ended up shining through art.Learn more about her with these Laurel Burch Art Projects for Kids.
I have had the opportunity to spend some time with amazing people over the last couple of weeks. These include everything from researchers in basic science laboratories looking for nature’s r…
