Collage Birds

The Kindergarteners worked together to create a Class Mural.  

Animals & the Alphabet

My Prek autistic Class consists of 6 kids and has proven to be quite the challenge.  What I have learned so far is to keep them moving!!  SO what I do, is have a few projects going on at once.  THe supplies are all set up at different tables and we do one step of one project and then Move to the next table and start a new project and in the 45 minutes we will probably start 4 different projects.  For this specific class I always try to go along with what their classroom teacher is doing because they need as much reenforcement as possible.  

At this time they were working on the Alphabet and Animals.

This Cat Needs a New Hat!!

For Read Across America, I created a contest for my  Second Graders!  Their goal was to make Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat a New Hat!! They had to use their imagination to create a unique new hat to replace the classic red & white striped hat that Dr. Seuss has made famous!  I talked to the students about how professional or famous artisits usually make several sketches before starting their artwork sometimes with very small modifications.  They also plan out their colors before starting.  So The students were to complete several sketches of different designs for their hat & then the students were supposed to star * their favorite design and that was the design they were going to do for the contest.  The kids came up with some great ideas!!! Once their hats were drawn on big paper I introduced the class to all the different supplies I had to offer I then went around to each table and took their "orders" like a waitress at a restaurant would.  The students enjoyed this!  I delivered the supplies to each table and they began!!  Here are the student's Creative Hats!!   

Which hat would you have chosen to win??

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

Here's another great lesson for read across america- I got it from the awesome site, Deep Space Sparkle and found it very successful & fun!  I did it with my first graders and they had so much fun drawing their fish! 

We read Dr. Seuss's book, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, which is actually a lot longer than I remembered it being as a child.  I did a directional drawing with the students where we all drew the fish together.  I broke down the fish into simple shapes.  A rainbow line for the top of the head etc. I did one example for vertical fish & one for horizontal fish.  We drew our fish with black oil pastel so there was no erasing which forced the students to take their time and learn to fix their mistakes and not just throw it away and start over.  In my art room we follow the mantra, there's no such things as mistakes!  I always encourage my students to take what they consider a mistake and change it into something new- some of the most famous artworks came to be that way. 

Yertle The Turtle

Once a week I have an Autistic Pre-K class.  There are only 6 students and two aids but by the end of 40 minutes I am exhausted!! They are super cute, little, love art and are FULL of energy!! I run this class very different than any of my other classes.  Each table is a station and we either work on the start of several projects in one class or we take each paper from station to station to add new materials.   Doing one thing for too long results in wanderers! In this particular lesson we took our paper from station to station.  

 

There's A Wocket in My Pocket

I LOVE Dr. Seuss!  So Read Across America Month is the perfect excuse to do a ton of Dr. Seuss inspired art lessons!  This year I read There's a Wocket in My Pocket to my Special Education 3/4th grade class.  We had a few laughs as we read the book and then while we were still on the carpet, I split the students into pairs and gave them some magazines.  I explained that they each needed to find a magazine picture of an object... such as a pocket, glass, couch, house etc. and rip it out, NICELY.  We would be creating our own creatures to live in those objects!  

The students were sent back to their seats to write their rhyming sentences.  There was only one rule-  The rhyming word had to be silly!!  "There's a mouse in my house"  just would not do!  "There's a Touse dancing on top of my house" was perfectly acceptable though!

Students were encouraged to be as creative as possible!  The students were to sketch their new imaginary creatures.  When sketches were approved, the students painted them with watercolor and then outlined with black permanent marker.  The objects were glued onto their magazine backgrounds.

My Many Colored Days

Here's another Dr. Seuss inspired lesson.  I try to take a theme and then get all of my grade levels to do a different project within that theme.  This sometimes poses a challenge but it's always worth it in the end!  I am currently at a school that is Pre-k through 3rd grade so it limits the amount of different lessons that I need to create.  With the combination of snow days, holidays, and various assemblys my kindergarten classes were left with one class period to make a picture for Read Across America.  We read My Many Colored Days  by Dr. Seuss which is a very short book which talks about how colors can represent feelings. 

                                         
                      

 I made a chart with all the different colors written and the class and I brainstormed how each color made us feel.. mad, sad, happy, excited etc.  When the students went back to their seats they got a slip of paper that said..  "The Color ________ makes me feel _________."  The students had to fill in the blank.  As the students were doing this (with spelling assistance from their classroom aid) I passed around tracers of simple figures like the ones used in the book, a magzine page and a white piece of paper to each student.  I chose to use pages from magazines to give their people a little more interest and texture.  Although, if the student was a little over zealous with the paint you would never know they used magazines.