Art Friday #3

Water Color Coffee Filters

Liquid watercolors are always a favorite. I tried to make the color lighter by adding water, but I added too much to the first group. The second group I added much less and the colors were better.

Ice Cream, You Scream...

...we all scream for RAINBOW Ice Cream!
Theme: Colors and Shapes

I used a circle punch to make the circles with cardstock. The kids used a brown crayon to make the cone lines and they followed the rainbow backwards to make the tall ice cream. They loved it. I added a magnet to the back so they could stick it on the fridge at home.

Shapes Capes

Felt Shapes Capes
Theme: Colors and Shapes

One of our favorite crafts to date. I pre cut the capes and the shapes and the kids glued them on with felt glue. Changes for next time: Use velcro circles for the shapes so they stick instantly and kids can use them right away.

Art Friday #2

We continued to explore the element of color and color mixing in art today. This time, the kids used strings as tools to create patters and mix the paint. The children each put one string saturated with red paint, one with yellow and one with blue, spreading them on half of their paper and leaving one bit sticking out the bottom. They folded them in half and put a heavy object on the paper while pulling the threads one at a time. Most of the kids exclaimed "WOW" as they opened up the paper. The results were beautiful and the process fun. A few kids may have benefited from gloves as they were a bit squeamish from touching the saturated strings, but all-in-all I think it was a good lesson.

 

Again adapted from the class on www.pinapplepaintbrush.com

 

Circle of Friends

A simple and tactile craft to illustrate once again that we can all be friends at preschool. I found the little kid stickers at Ben Franklin Crafts and added some shiny school tool stickers for a bit of color and fun. I pre-printed the "My Happy Day Friends" onto cardstock and cut the circles out. The kids had a bit of trouble taking the backing off the foam stickers, but it was great exercise for those little fine motor muscles. It took us about 10-15 minutes per small group.

Materials, for each student:

• Round cardstock paper (8" circle)
• stickers for the # of total students
• other stickers (optional)

The Rainbow Fish

One of my favorite books about sharing and friendship is The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. The fish learns that by giving away his most prized possessions, he gains happiness and a circle of friends. Being beautiful and lonely is no way to live!

We created our own rainbow fish with these .
For each child:

• a fish cut-out (I printed them on blue cardstock and pre-cut)
• tissue paper circles/10-20 per student (ovals or semi-circles would also be nice)
• one silvery scale
• large googly-eye
• glue
• optional: silver and gold crayon for markings on fins, tail and gold lips.

This craft was simple enough for all the kids to do very independently (some help with glue), but also fun and exciting to them to create this character. The story is simple and they get the meaning right away. Sharing is good!

Art Friday #1

I decided during the summer to teach a more focused art curriculum to the pre-k set this year so every Friday we do Art Class. I found this awesome blog:

http://www.pineapplepaintbrush.com/

and purchased Dani's pdf of her simple and fun Introduction to Art for Preschoolers. Our first art element is color.

I showed the preschoolers some colorful works of art by Brazilian-American artist Romero Britto. They were intrigued by his use of color, shape and subject.

www.britto.com

We talked about the primary colors: red, yellow, blue and they watched as I used my "magic" paintbrush to mix and change the colors. Of course, these kids are too smart for me and knew that the colors mix already...

We created symmetrical paintings by using only red, yellow, and blue paint, then observing how these colors mix as we used brushes or simply pressed the paper and opened it. We had a bit of over-mixing and some brown results, but most of the kids listened well to directions and tried to keep the mixing to a minimum so the colors and changes would show through. Here are some results:

Manners Moose and Rude-y Rhino

Two of our favorite hand puppets at school are Manners Moose and Rude-y Rhino.

 

The kids love helping Rude-y learn to talk more appropriately and kindly and to follow the rules at school. This simple craft let them create their own stick puppets to take home.

 

I created simple drawings of the puppets and printed them on cardstock with their names printed below. I pre-cut them this time.

 

Each child colored their puppet with crayons. Some of them wanted to copy my example and others did their own thing.

 

 

 

They stuck them on pre-glue-dotted craft sticks with their name labels on the back. The entire craft time took about 15 minutes with washing hands after for lunch. I heard quite a few funny conversations between the two puppets!

Happy Day Sunshine Craft

Since our name is Happy Day Pre-K what could be more fitting for day one than a Happy Day sunshine with our theme song printed on the back?

 

 

 

Materials: (One for each student unless noted.)

• yellow plates
• yellow and orange rectangles of various sizes with a diagonal line drawn from long corner to corner. (Great way to assess student cutting skills on day one.)
• Glue
• Dot stickers for "cheeks"
• Black sharpie
• Theme song printed and pre-cut
• Ribbon or string for hanger
• Name label (I pre-print name labels on blank address labels for most crafts and just stick them on the back while the kids are working)

 

Comments: This was not the best craft to start with Day One because it involved cutting AND gluing, both of which can be tricky with the Pre-K set. I think I would cut out the gluing next time and have the kids stick the triangles on an already applied adhesive such as roller tape. I would also have more pre-cut triangles for those kids who took 10 minutes to cut one set.:) Also, it may have helped to have the triangles a bit shorter so that they would fit on the tables as the kids worked side-by-side a bit better.