The Blues

This project is from February for Black History Month.  I feel like I never get caught up with everything.  Anyway, for this project I play some blues music and have the 2nd graders identify the instruments.  We talk about the beat and what feelings we get from this type of music.  We than talk about how many different blue colors there are.  Students realize there are infinite possibilities.  They divide there paper up into squares/rectangles and are given watercolor paints to make as many blues as they can.  This becomes the background for our pictures.  I have templates they can choose from to use for their foreground which they trace, color and cut out.  The following week we put these on with 3-DO's.  While they are creating I read the book A Blue So Blue, by Jean Francois Dumont.  Has beautiful illustrations and a cute storyline.  

Camouflage

2nd graders study animal habitats and one of the things they learn about animals is how many of them are camouflaged.  So in Art students learned how to draw a lizard, colored it with oil pastels and cut it out.   Using watercolors they created a background that the lizards would be camouflaged on and glued them down.  

Kindergarten Robots

The robots are coming!  I read this book to my kindergarten students.  Love the illustrations.  I took photos of each page and made a keynote of it so that my students could see the illustrations on my big screen.  In the first class students chose pre-cut pieces of cardboard and painted them.  The following class they made a background and glued the cardboard pieces onto it.  The final step was using "fun junk" to add details to their robots.  This was a fun project and students learned about recycling cardboard and how to use shapes to make robots.