Gingerbread House Paintings Kindergarten lesson

 

 

Kinders love to paint! These houses were traced first on brown kraft paper and then we started with the white paint (frosting).  Every year the Kinders make graham cracker gingerbread houses in their classrooms with their parents so painting a 2D one was a neat tie in to the one they were building in class.  They were very familiar with all the kinds of candy that can be added once the sticky frosting is applied!  The Gingerbread cookies were colored with construction paper crayons on brown paper and added the next time after the kids cut out the houses.

 

 

 

Very fun and colorful!

Christmas Cacti Lesson 3rd grade

Living in Michigan, we have decorate Evergreen trees in our yards for the holidays so my 3rd graders were intrigued with the photos I showed them of decorated cacti plants! I asked them why someone might put lights on a cactus instead of a fir tree. They quickly problem solved that it was because they didn't have the same trees where they live as we do. 

We had a lesson on drawing cacti plants of various types and they filled a pot with cacti. Students then had the option of decorating the pot with southwest type designs or Christmas designs. They could also add things to the cacti like lights or small Santa hats.

 I gave them this idea sheet to get them started on southwest designs if that was their choice.  Some chose to do a combination pot of southwest and Christmas.

 

small details were colored with colored markers and then large areas were colored with chalks rubbed with paper towel.  These turned out lovely!

School Auction Art Projects

I was asked to have my art students create a grade level project to be auctioned off at the PTO spaghetti dinner/auction fundraiser.  This required finding something that approx. 150 children per grade level could work on as one project during their art periods. Luckily, Pinterest had several ideas for group projects that I was able to get ideas from. 
I talked to the kids about how artists can benefit their community through community art projects or by donating their work.  The students were excited to help the PTO and work on one large piece of artwork as a grade.  Hoping to raise lots of money for field trips and events through our donation!

Kindergarten thumbprint cityscape. When all kids have added thumbprints I will remove the green stencil and this colorful city will be displayed in a glass frame.

1st graders each colored a cupcake and 150 cupcakes are being applied to this repurposed furniture pallet with gloss medium.

 

2nd graders are using paint markers to make radial patterns on a spray painted table. They already learned this technique on an earlier lesson with paper and oil pastels so students are familiar with making patterns in a circle instead of a line. With so many kids needing to work on this small table, each child makes one pattern of the circle.

 

 

3rd grade is similar to the 1st grade project except each artist colored a beautiful teacup!

 

4th graders are painting a large tree with concentric circles. They learned about this art style in 3rd grade so it is going very smoothly. Using acrylics on wood.

 

 

The 5th grade thrift store chair I spray painted white is going to be covered with zentangle designs.  Again, they did zentangles earlier in the year so they can quickly create their doodle in a space on the chair and then return to working on their independent art project.