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.  

Jazz Music Collage

This project was in collaboration with the music teacher.  I took the music sheet to the song the class was singing/dancing to in the Black History Month Concert & had the students use these as part of their collage.  An Autistic Class completed these.  The students ranged from 1st to fourth grade.  We focus on manipulation of materials as well as arrangement/spacing.  Key Concepts that are reviewed are Collage, Warm vs. Cool Colors, Background, three-dimensional vs. two dimensional.  

The first thing I do is dump a bunch of music notes onto their tables.  These I have cut out of manila folders.  The students pick which ones they want and tape them onto their paper.  


Next, the students are given warm colors ( I tell them to think of a flame)  They sponge paint their papers going right over their music notes.