Model Magic Polar Bears

Materials:

- one small package of white model magic for each student

-permanent markers

Chelsey, Alyvia, Danny, Allie, Leah and Strat

Polar Bears Overview:  Not all classes got to make these polar bears.  Only the classes that earned it by getting 80 points in my star reward system.  Here’s how my star sysem works: each class can earn up to 5 behavioral points, or stars, in a week.  When a class gets to 80 stars they get to make model magic polar bears.  This year only about half the classes in the school earned 80 stars.

Kylee, Porter, Karina, Zach and Lilly

1- Roll your whole clump of model magic into a ball.

2- Split your ball into two equal parts. Set one aside until step 4.

3- Spit one of the balls into two unequal parts, one should be about one third the size of the other.  Roll these two parts into balls.  One will become the head and the other will be the body.

4- Take the biggest ball, the one we did not split apart in the last step, and pinch a small piece off.  This should be about one fourth the size of the head, it will become the nose.

5- Take the ball that will become the head and connect the nose ball to it, then pinch two small round ear shapes into the top. Your head is done for now, you’ll draw the eyes and mouth on with a marker later.

6- Take the medium ball, or the body piece, and roll it into an elongated sphere, like a big pill.

7- Connect the head to the body shape.

8- Now we’re going to make 4 legs out of the large ball that is left over.  First, split it in half.  Second, take those halves and  split them both in half.  You should have four equal parts, roll them into balls.

9- Roll these balls into long pill shapes for the short legs of the bear.

10- Attach the legs to the bear’s body in whatever pose you want your bear to be in.

11- Once your bear is all put together, pinch a short tail shape out of the bottom.

12- Draw the face and the paws onto your bear with permanent markers.  

12- Write your initials on the bottom and put your bear onto the shelf where we’ll have it sit for a week while it drys out

Jonny, Ashley and Eliza

Alyvia, Caleb, Travvon, Braden, Katie, and Talya

Made by: Mrs. Tanner's 4th grade class

Mandalas

Carson

Chloee

Materials:

-markers

-copies of mandala designs

Mandalas Overview: Since the last lesson, the paint chip bears, were pretty difficult and many classes were not quite done with their bears we needed an easy filler lesson.  I found these mandala coloring pages online.

1-  Pass out the mandala patterns and color them in!

Mrs. Larson's class

Paint Chip Bears

bear pattern paper

Materials:

Bears:

-copies of bear pattern paper

-paint color chips

-brass fasteners

-scissors

-glue

-crayons

-black permanent markers

Backgrounds:

-large sheets of construction paper

-oil pastels

-assorted colors of scrap paper

Teddy Bears Overview: These bears are made out of construction paper and those colored paint chips that you can pick up at home improvement stores, their arms and legs are movable because they are attached by brass fasteners, not glued on.  We also made backgrounds for the bears so they could be put into a local art show for elementary aged students at the Spring Creek Festival.  This project took most classes at least 2 weeks.

Bears:

1- Have each student choose a color among the paint swatches, they’ll need 2 pages of the same color.

2- Cut out the two rectangles on the bear pattern paper, and glue them to the back of the two paint swatch papers.  Once this step is done one side will be the color and the other side will be the bear patterns.

3- Cut out the body of the bear, don't cut out the limbs until later.

4- Color in the shapes of the belly, nose and ear holes, then cut them out.  (1st and 2nd grade can draw the ear holes onto the bear with marker.)

5- Glue the shapes of the belly, nose and ear holes onto the colored side of the bear body.  

6- Draw eyes above the nose with permanent marker.

7- Cut out the limbs.  Students can choose to keep the claws on or just cut them off.

8-  Poke holes in the spots on the body and limbs where the brass fasteners will go through the paper to connect the arms and legs. We used thumbtacks to poke the holes and pieces of foam core poster boards as cutting boards.

9- Connect the limbs with brass fasteners.

Your bears are finished!

By Emmalee

Backgrounds:

The second week of this lesson we made background for out bears.  It can be anywhere: under water, in space, a candy castle, a roller coaster or maybe just a normal bear cave near a river for the bear to fish in.  I let the students use their imaginations.  

- Start with one large sheet of colored construction paper for each student.

- Use scraps of construction paper and oil pastels to make any place the students want.

-Once the background is finished each student needs to write one sentence that starts with “My Bear.”  For example: “My bear is exploring Mars.” or “My bear lives in an ice cream shop so she can eat all the ice cream she wants.”

- For the students who got into the art show, we put Velcro on the back of the bears to connect them to their backgrounds so they can still take them off and play with them.  (Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to buy enough velcro for all 450 of my students.) 

Camilla, Braxton, Hannah, Addie, Hayden, and Anna

Who is this pretty lady?  It's me, Mrs. Cambria!

Hannah, Amelia, and Aubrey, all 3 sisters were in the art show!

Valentines Hearts

Materials:

     Week 1

-quartered sheets of construction paper, assorted colors for 3rd-5th grade
-Halved sheets of construction paper, assorted colors for 1st and 2nd grade.  

-construction paper crayons

-assorted paint colors (We used powder paint)

-paint brushes

-masking tape

-1 whole sheet of black construction paper for each student 
      Week 2

-oil pastels

-assorted stamps

-plates of paint to dip stamps into

Valentines Hearts Overview: These Hearts are based on the artist Jim Dine’s heart paintings, they are not the usual pretty Valentines Day hearts with lace.  They are a little bit abstract and very colorful.  This is a 2 week project.  1st and 2nd grade will paint 2 hearts and 3rd-5th grade will paint 4 hearts.

by Jim Dine

Week One:

1- Each student starts with 1 whole sheet of black construction paper.   1st and 2nd graders get  2 sheets of halved construction paper, 3rd-5th graders get 4 sheets of quartered construction paper.

2- Fold the smaller sheets in half and draw half a heart touching the crease.  Demonstrate the correct way and the wrong way to cut hearts.  Once the students understand how to make hearts go ahead and cut them out.

*The important part of this step is to keep the 4 outside shapes, the hearts that we cut out are not important.  (We saved them and wrote notes to their teachers on them.)

3-  Tape the 2 or 4 heart shapes to the black construction paper with masking tape.  Make sure the tape does not overlap the heart shaped holes in the smaller paper.  These sheets mask the parts of the black paper underneath that we don’t want to get paint on.  

4- Paint each of the heart shapes one solid color, no paint mixing.  The students can use a different color for each heart or they can paint all their hearts with the same color.

5- Put them on the drying rack!  LEAVE THE HEART SHAPES TAPED ON, DO NOT PEEL  THEM OFF.  

*this all usually takes all of one class.  If there is extra time students can decorate the hearts they cut out in step 2.

It should look like this near the end, before you peel the extra paper layer off.

Week Two:  

1- Scribble about 3 colors of oil pastel onto each heart.

2- Stamp all the hearts with whatever colors and whatever shapes you want.  The oil pastel layer underneath will make most stamp shapes appear random.

3- Drying rack

4- Once all the paint is dry, carefully peel off the layer of construction paper heart shapes off to reveal 2/4 perfectly shaped abstract hearts!

Ade

Mother's Day Butterflies

Materials:

-cardboard toilet paper rolls

-construction paper cut 4 inches wide, assorted colors

-whole sheets of construction paper, assorted colors

Butterflies Overview:  We made these butterflies for Mother’s Day.  We collected toilet paper rolls for about a month before this project.

Karli, Ian and Jayda

1- Each student needs one toilet paper roll, one rectangle of paper cut 4 inches thick, and one whole sheet of construction paper.

2- Cut a thin strip of paper off one of the short edges of the 4 inch rectangle, this will become the antennae.

3- Cut the thin strip of paper in half and glue it to the top middle of the rectangular paper, flip the paper over and draw a face right under the antennae, and decorate the rest of that paper.

Hand wings from step 7

4- Apply a lot of glue all over the back of the rectangular paper and roll it onto the toilet paper roll.  If the cardboard roll is longer than the 4 inch paper cut the extra cardboard off the bottom.

5- The students should still have a blank sheet construction paper, fold it in half hamburger style.

6- Trace your hand onto the paper that has been folded in half make sure the palm of your hand overlaps the crease.  

7- Cut out the tracing of your hand and keep the paper folded in half so you end up with 2 hand shapes connected. This will be the wings.

8- Write a note to your Mom on the back, and decorate the front of the wings.

9- Glue the wings onto the back of the toilet paper roll.

Mrs. Cooks class: Addy, Teela, Sadie, Taelon, and Leah

Easter Eggs

These examples are from students who forgot to write their names on their paper.

Mrs. Mckell's Class

Materials:

-oil pastels

-scissors

-glue

-whole sheets of cool colored construction paper

-egg shapes copied onto sheets of warm colored construction paper

-butterfly shapes copied on sheets of warm paper for students who don't celebrate Easter

Grady, Gage, Ben, Lailani, Bridger, Danee, Taylee, Elle, Alexis and Ashley

 Easter Eggs Overview: In this lesson the students learn about the difference between warm colors and cool colors.  The eggs are colored with warm colors to make them stand out against a cool colored background.

1- Discuss warm colors: red, orange and yellow.  Color the eggs using only warm colors.

2-Discuss cool colors: purple, blue and green.  Color the background these colors.  I also allowed the kids to use white in their backgrounds.
3- Cut out the eggs and glue them onto the cool colored background.

Ty, Will, Chase, Dewayne and Chaston

Parker, Kamrie, Ellie and Ashley

ipads

Materials:

- Pre-copied ipads with 9 blank squares

- Pencils

- Colored Pencils

- Large app examples

ipads overview:  This lesson was actually the P.T.A.’s idea!  It was for White Ribbon Week, which is internet safety week at our school.  First we discussed internet safely and websites that could possibly be unsafe without adult supervision.  For this lesson I asked the kids not to include any social networking sites and any photo or video sharing sites. Then the kids filled in the blank squares with whatever apps they want.  

1- Write the name of all 9 apps underneath the blank squares before beginning.  (1st grade can skip this step).I found that if I didn’t insist that they labeled all of their apps before coloring them in I may get back pages with only a few apps filled in or 9 of the same app.

2- Use colored pencils to draw the app icons in each box.

ipads from Mrs. Mckell's class

Fred

Origami

origami ceiling display in our art room

Materials:

-Origami paper

Origami Overview: I think most people already know what origami is, so it needs no explanation.  Each grade has their own origami project.

 1st grade: cat heads

2nd grade: sailboats

3rd grade: balloons

4th grade: can choose to do balloons or paper cranes
5th grade: paper cranes

Max

Forrests With Foxes

Materials:

 - 1 large sheet of white paper for each student

- 1 strip of black paper cut 1.5 inches wide (this will be the big tree)

-2 or 3 strips of black paper cut 1 inch wide (these will be the medium trees)

-2 or 3 strips of black paper cut half an inch wide (these will be the small trees)

-white oil pastels

-black watercolor

-paintbrushes

-scissors

-glue

-black sharpies

-pencils

-pre-printed fox outlines for younger students

Some finished projects by 2nd graders

Forrests Overview:This is a 2 week project.  All the students are making essentially the same image: 6 black trees on a snow covered ground with a fox walking through and leaving footprints.  In this lesson the  students will learn about perspective.  Before you begin explain how the tree nearest to the viewer will be the biggest, the bottom of it’s trunk will be closest to the bottom of the page; and the trees that are further away will be smaller and the bottom of their trunks will be further from the bottom of the page.  Also, in this lesson the students also learn about shadows.  The image we are making is supposed to take place in the evening so all the shadows are long and point in the same direction.

 
To demonstrate these concepts I drew this simple picture on the board.  As you can see, the stick figure people get smaller and smaller as they get further away, also the further away they are the higher the person appears on the page. (Jut like the tree trunks in this assignment.)  The drawing also displays directional shadows like in the lesson.  In this image the direction of the sun determines the direction of the shadows, in our forest image there is no spot for a sun, but the students can see the idea in this image.

Week 1:

1- Glue the large strip of paper vertically about 1-2 inches from the bottom of the page.  (It will probably hang off the top, students can cut off this small tab of paper later.)

2- Glue the 2 or 3 medium trees onto the paper, the bottom of their trunks should be about 2 inches higher than the bottom of the large tree’s trunk.

3- Glue the 2 or 3 small trees onto the paper about 1-2 inches higher than the medium trees.

4- Cut off any bits of paper that hang off the top of the page, keep the extra pieces of the small half inch thick trees and use them to make branches for the large tree.  (The rest of the trees do not get branches.)

5- Take a white oil pastel and hold it sideways, drag it over each of the trees to give them a bit of a grayish texture.

Week 2:

1- Lightly watercolor diagonal shadows for all the trees.  Remind students that all the shadows need to go in the same direction and that they should touch the bottom of the tree trunks and  go all the way to the edge of the page.

2- Put the papers on the drying rack, they should be dry by the time we need them again.

3- Have students choose red or orange paper to draw their fox on.  Younger grades can just choose either a red or orange paper with a fox printed onto it.

4- (Younger grades can skip this step.) 
Draw the fox.  Follow these instructions:
     a: rounded rectangle, this will be the body

     b: circle for the head

     c: triangle for nose.  

     d: 2 triangles for ears

     e: elongated football shape for tail

     f: 4 rectangular legs

5- Cut the fox out, and flip over to side with no pencil marks

6- Use the black sharpie to draw the nose and eyes, and color the feet black.  Use the white oil pastel to color the tip of the tail white.

7- Get the page with the forest off the drying rack.

8- Glue the fox onto the forest.  Explain that the fox’s feet must be lower than the trunk of any tree that his body overlaps; or the fox will appear to be levitating.

9- Use sharpies to add footprints where the fox had walked across the snow.  (Usually the simpler the footprints are the better.)

10- Lightly watercolor a shadow for the fox, match the direction of the shadow to the direction of the trees’ shadow.

Macy and Karissa

Dax