Henri Matisse Art Lesson

I started out my art lesson by reading "Matisse" by Laurence Anholt.  There is a series of books on famous artists that Anholt has produce ... you must check them out as they are very well done.  Once finished, we talked about making our own stained glass art.  I used a die press to punch out flowers on 11"x17" construction paper cut in half.  Cutting out brightly coloured tissue paper, students were able to glue the tissue down around the flower cut out and successfully glue the back side of the stained glass.  We hung them above our desks to celebrate what we learned about Matisse. 

Ten Apples Up on Top

At the beginning of the year, one of the first activities I have students do is "Ten Apples Up On Top".  I pre-cut the apples and give 10 to each child.  After reading the story by Dr. Seuss, I have students draw their face at the bottom of the sheet and glue the apples upon their heads, then write the numbers from 1 to 10 on the apples.  This is a really quick way to see who knows their numbers. 

Our Enormous Stories

  

I introduced some stories to my students that involved pulling a vegetable from the garden.  Some of the titles included the "The Enormous Potato", by Aubrey Davis, "The Gigantic Turnip", by Aleksei Tolstoy and "Kumak's Fish", by Michael Bania.   They had to create their own version of this story and they had fun with it.  Our bulletin board show each of us pulling on a watermelon!

"The Three Little Pigs"

A colleague from my grade one cohort had this good idea that I was eager to use in my classroom.  She had a net design that the students cut out and glue over a kleenex box.  Drawn on one side was the straw house, another was the stick house and lastly the brick house of the "Three Little Pigs".  We used glue guns to glue on the straw, we went outside to gather sticks and coloured the brick house.  I gave them finger cut outs of the three pigs and the wolf.  They had to retell the story to their grade five buddies using as much expression and story as possible.  The results were very good.  They enjoyed building their house and were excited to take them home.  An additional language arts activity we did was a readers theater version of the three little pigs. 

Butterfly Shape Poems

My students brainstormed words associated with butterflies and then placed a tracer of the butterfly outline underneath their white sheet and wrote the words of their choice on the outline.  They turned out wonderfully.  We also used markers to colour coffee filters and wet them to blend the colour.  Using a pipe cleaner, we twisted it into the frame of the butterfly body and antenna.

A collection of stories written by the students about themselves

My students answered the following questions about themselves.  On their good copy they drew a pictures of themselves with their family.  We collected them and then bound them as a collection.  They were each allowed to take the bound collection home for one night and then passed it on to the next person in the collection.  It was a fun and easy way to get them to write about what they knew. 

A collections of stories written about themselves