Festive Reindeer

Grade 1s asked for a festive holiday project and I saw this on Pinterest this morning so I quickly made it happen for my afternoon class. I love how simple but striking these are. Thank you to ARTventurous who posted a great lesson on drawing and painting these little guys. The only addition I made was to have students add some small dabs of gel glue to the paintings at the end and sprinkle with a little bit of white sparkly glitter. You can never go wrong with glitter! :)

An empty bulletin board was just waiting for some festive cheer.
Got this up quickly this afternoon!

Colourful Shape Stamping

Shape stamping got very messy and super creative with Grade 1s. I  found a great lesson at laughpaintcreate that focused on letting students explore the different possibilites of mark making on paper (with foam shapes, forks, lids, etc.). 



First, students cut and placed sticky foam shapes onto cardboard squares. (Obviously, this one has already been used as a stamp.)



more stamps...



Then they painted their shapes with liquid tempera, stamped them several times onto the paper, and added more marks with forks and lids.

  

Awesome colour and sense of movement!



More structured and controlled.



Swirling Skies over Cities at Dusk

Right before the winter break, I tried this Deep Space Sparkle lesson with my Grade 1s and they turned out fantastic. Students loved painting the swirling sky backgrounds in the style of Van Gogh and pasting on paper to create houses and buildings.



Grade 1 Tigers

                    

I thought that my Grade 1s would LOVE this drawing lesson on Tigers that I saw on The Art Teacher's Closet - and they did!

After a guided pencil drawing of a tiger (I broke it down into very small steps on the board), students went over their pencil lines with a Sharpie marker, coloured their tiger stripes with black crayon, applied orange watercolour paint, and then cut and glued leaf shapes from tissue paper. I love how these turned out. Each one has a different personality!