Blowing paint

For art one day we blew paint.  Admittedly this was the first time I had ever blown paint.  It took a while to get it just right.  I had to add a lot of water to the paint - but not too much.  

I provided long straws, short straws, fat straws, and skinny straws.  I wanted them to figure out which they liked best, which worked best, and which gave the effect they wanted.

Name Puzzles

At our large group for the letter P we talked about puzzles.  I gave each child 2 pieces of papers that looked like the ones below.

On this one the children wrote: P and Puzzle

Then they turned this paper over and wrote their name very big - than they turned it back around and cut out  the puzzle pieces.  I took the picture before i was finished - I put dots in the middle of each piece so that they knew which side was the front and which was the back when it was time to put it back together.

Cutting the squiggle lines was great practice.

Then it was time to flip the pieces over and put their names back together on their white paper.

Painting

One d ay we were talking about the letter p.  So of course at the art center we had to paint.  I wanted to introduce having some plans and purpose to their art.  So we came up with the three "p"s.  First make a plan about what you want your picture to be.  Then draw a picture with a pencil.  Then paint it.

We ended with some great, detailed works of art!

handprint class rainbow

At the end of the day we did a class project making a giant hand print rainbow.  It is nice to do big projects like this sometimes - it teaches cooperation and collaboration and how one individual can affect the whole.

It was very very messy - but well worth it - and I think we managed the mess well.

We started with red on the right hand.  

Then skipped orange and went to yellow on the left hand -

then rubbed our two hands together to make orange.  This made our rainbow look very authentic because we had real color mixing.  This was also a great activity in following directions and stamping our hands on the correct place.

And then so on for green, blue and purple.

sticky rainbow

In another corner of the classroom I set up a sticky wall rainbow with cut up paper and tissue paper and cotton balls.

oatmeal box rainbow

I cut up an oatmeal box to make curved rainbow shapes for some rainbow painting prints.

Most children made the rainbows "correctly" (not that we ever said that) and some played with the shapes and colors to make very creative pictures.  (sad I didn't get a picture of those)

st patricks day

Some St. Patrick's day patterning.

We also made some green glittery slime.  We made it together and that was f. u. n. !

white board rainbow

At the beginning of the year we did a unit on colors, color mixing, and rainbows.  St. Patrick's day is a great time of year to review those things and fill in the gaps of what got missed or not remembered.

I decided to bring back our white board rainbow.

It seems like such a simple activity that it might bore the children.  But it never does - it is so colorful and inviting.  There is also so much collaboration that goes into it.  Plus they can just come and go from it all morning, making changes or taking it all off.

field trip

We ended our unit on fish with a filed trip to Neptune's Tropical fish store.  I made activities to do while we were there.  The store isn't' big and I was worried about there being enough to do.  We ended up only using 1 or 2 of the activities because we didn't need them - there was so much to look at, explore, and talk about.

I thought it would be a good idea to walk around the store first just observing and talking - and  then come back around again to do our activities.  Next time I will do activities the first time - the kids were much more engaged when everything was new to them.

The workers were so awesome and got many of the cool creatures out of the tanks for the kids to touch, hold, and feel.  They also helped them on their fish color scavenger hunt.

we had such a great time ending our fish unit!