1st Grade Hot and Cold Color Cityscapes

The students and I started off this lesson by looking at different cities skylines - things they noticed: buildings, windows, doors, cars, lights, sky, squares, rectangles, each city looks different.

I showed students two different techniques to make their cities and off they went!  Each city is an unique as the students themselves - adding stores and places they have been like: toys'r'us, target, St. Lukes Hospital, Walmart.... ect.

After the students created their city, added all the necessary windows, doors, signs - they sharpie outlined their creations.

The next class students and I reviewed hot and cold colors - most of them mastered these groups of colors in kindergarten.  The students then chose if they wanted their sky hot or cold and then their buildings were opposite.  I had originally thought to have the sky hot colors like a sunset and the buildings cold - but a first grader asked if he could do his the other way around because the sky is really blue.  Thus, the choice to pick where your colors went as long as all the hot colors were together and all the cold colors together.



They are stunning!

Kindergarten People

I enjoy doing people drawings with kindergarten in the beginning of the year and at the end - it always shows such great growth!  Here are some examples from the beginning of the year.  I emphasized that their people needed to fill the paper, have eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs.  I generally don't specifically ask the students to draw bodies - as some students are developmentally aware and others are still drawing cookie people (arms and legs come out of head).  The students generally will trace their pencil drawings with Sharpie and then watercolor.  The developmental range is beautiful.

ToothFaries (2nd)

All of my 2nd grade students have lost teeth, so what better inspiration?

Students Learned/Practiced:
--Brainstorming
--Creating
--Planning
--Outlining
--Using paint
--Cleaning Up
--Putting work on drying racks
--Sharing

The students and I brainstormed two different locations for the tooth fairies to be flying: outside in the neighborhood or in their bedroom. We did an example of each place as a class. The tooth fairy was what we drew first to make sure it was nice and big at the top and sideways to show that it was flying. The students and I discussed how there could be boy and girl fairies -- this made it much more exciting for the boys.

The students then received huge paper and told to draw either their bedroom or their neighborhood with their tooth fairies. The creativity between the students was amazing! There were tooth fairies every size, there was one that hit the closed window, one got stuck in a tornado, and all sorts of other imaginative things. A couple of students that drew their neighborhoods added trees from our ice trees. Then there were even a few students that drew the inside of their bedroom on half and their neighborhood on the other.

Once the students were done drawing they outlined with black crayon and used watercolor to fill in their pictures. After they were all done we added glitter to their fairies if they wanted.