Who doesn't love an art activity?! I know when I was in school, my favorite thing to do was art. And I have to admit, one of my favorite things to teach is art! My class is by far the most engaged in the learning process when participating in some sort of hands-on, artistic project. Unfortunately, there really isn't any time to teach art....unless you attach it to something else! Oh the beauty of integration.
These last few weeks we have been studying the seasons of the year as part of our social studies curriculum. There are thousands of ways to integrate art and seasons. Here are just a few ideas that I did with my class and they loved them.
First we studied Spring (simply because that is what we are experiencing right now!). I read a few picture books, we talked about spring and the different things we see, smell, touch, etc. as the season unfolds. Of course flowers came up and this is the art activity we did to represent spring.
I taught them about mosaics and showed them some examples of amazing mosaics I found on google images. Believe me, they were inspired! To make their own they first used an assortment of small green squares of different shades to make the grass, stem, and leaves. I gave them each a cupcake liner for the head of the flower. They colored theirs (mine was just a basic example) then each put a small picture of themselves in the center of the cupcake liner. They also decorated theirs with clouds, sunshine, rain, etc. to make it their own personal creation. They turned out adorable!
For another project, as we discussed all the different seasons and how the trees change in each season, we made this flip-book. I have seen a lot of different variations of this idea.
For mine I started with a blank sheet of paper and drew an outline of a tree with branches. I copied that paper as a base for each student, then copied just the top half of the tree (3 for each student for each of the other seasons. We started by decorating the full sheet of the paper for fall/autumn. They colored the trunk, branches, grass, and sky, then we tore of pieces of orange, red, yellow, and brown paper for the leaves.
For summer, we took one of the half sheets (that just had the branches) and simply colored the branches, colored green leaves and the blue sky.
For spring, we again colored the sky and branches, then used pink, red, and violet ink pads to stamp blossoms on the branches using our fingertips.
The top page was the winter tree. For this page we of course colored the branches and sky, then gently pulled apart cotton balls and glued them onto the branches of the tree to look like snow.
After each page was decorated and dried, we laid them on top of each other in order and put two staples at the top so they can be turned to see how the tree looks in each of the seasons.
So there you have it!
