Mothers Day Flower Bouquet Cards

I've been so busy preparing my students for NAPLAN that I nearly forgot about Mother's Day this weekend! Yikes! For those who don't know, the NAPLAN (National Assessment Program- Literacy and Numeracy) is a national standardised test that all students in year 3, 5, 7 and 9 take annually. This test is conducted under exam conditions. Because my babies students are in year 3, they will be taking the NAPLAN test for the first time. I've been trying, to the best of my ability, to prepare them as much as possible, and in doing so COMPLETELY forgot about Mother's Day. I basically raided my arts cupboard today to come up with a quick but effective card craft my kids could complete in an afternoon. Fortunately, luck was on my side!

Here are the things you will need for this craft task… When it comes to craft material I am a hoarder make sure I don't throw anything that may come in handy!

The first thing I got the students to do was fold their paper doily to create the base of the bouquet.

Then students cut strips of green paper and slid them inside their doily pocket for the flower stems.

Flowers can be so tricky! But I loved using this no fuss method to create them. The students traced around the top of a plastic cup for a large circle, and then the bottom of the cup for a smaller circle

We then put the smaller circle inside the bigger circle, and then added a button in the middle to create our flowers.

We added a a lovely gold bow and voila! I just love how these worked out! Might have to make one for my mum too!

xx Miss A

Birch Tree Art Project

Every Saturday, I take care of 3 amazing little boys! They are so adorable! Each of them has their own unique (and very different) personality. Whether we're making taco's, having pretend ninja fights or watching a movie these boys are a constant joy. With them around, my Saturdays are always entertaining!

One of my favourite things to do with the boys is painting! This week I only had black and white paint (note to self: always order well ahead of time!) so I used trusty Pinterest to see what sort of art activity I could scrounge up. There really is some great black and white paintings out there, but none that were really kid friendly. Then I came across this pin from A Little Lovely

I love the effect the card-paint combo makes, it looks so pretty. This inspired me to create a birch tree art project with the kiddies!

First we painted a small circle at the top of the page, then used different shades of grey to create a glowing moon effect. 

We then filled the rest of the page in black. I got the kids to flick watered down black paint to create a starry night sky.

My favourite part! The boys dipped a card (preferably one you don't use anymore!) in white paint and then swiped across to create their birch trees. We created the leaves by lightly dabbing paint and ta-da! A beautiful starry night, birch tree portrait!

xx Miss A

Colour Mixing Activity

Teaching colour mixing is always fun and exciting! I love this colour mixing activity, and it's always a hit with my students. You will need: diluted blue, red and yellow food colouring, matchsticks  newspaper, pipettes and a the colour mixing chart template which you will find here. 

Follow the dot pattern on the colour mixing sheet using the food colouring- make sure your students have one pipette per colour!

Mix the colours together with a toothpick, if you start from the yellow and go in an clockwise direction you won't need to change toothpicks.

Gently place the paper towel over the colour mixing sheet and watch the colours form!

I love the results, a real colour wheel with no fuss!

Keep smiling!

Miss A

Random Line Drawing Art Activity

It's amazing how much we underestimate children sometimes! This activity really proved that to me. I call this the 'Random Line Drawing' activity because your whole picture is based on just that- a random line! First I put a clean sheet of paper on the white board for the whole class to see. Using a black marker, I drew a random line. I then asked my students how they can turn this randomly drawn line into a work of art. If someone came up with a suggestion that I felt was creative enough, they would receive that sheet of paper and could start their art work. Then I would draw another random line and repeat this process until every student had a sheet of paper. I think this is a really good strategy, as the students who were still a but unsure got to hear all the suggestion from the other students, and I think this got their creative juices flowing! Some lines were curly, some were straight, some had sharp edges and some had soft edges. No two lines were the same! I was um-ing and ah-ing about doing this for quite sometime because I really did underestimate just how creative my students could be, but I'm glad I did it, they look fantastic and the students were super proud of their work!

Keep Smiling!

Miss A

Moonlit Starry Night Sky Painting

I've found that a lot of teachers are quite hesitant to use paint in art lessons. The prospect of 20+ children with paint trays can seem quite daunting, but I think if you have clear expectations and structure, your lessons will run very smoothly. One of the most important things is to make sure you have EVERYTHING set out and ready before your lesson begins- the last thing you want to do is to be juggling mixing paint, finding paint brushes, tying students aprons etc along with making sure students are on the right track with their art work.

This week we did a 'Moonlit Starry Night Sky' painting. I got the idea here on pinterest (for those who have not invested in a Pinterest account yet- do it! It's a must have for all teachers) and couldn't resist trying it out with my kiddo's!

I have a period at the start of every art lesson which I call 'Instruction Time'. During this time, we talk about the different art techniques behind the painting we are about to do and I do a demonstration. For this activity we discussed colour shades. I showed students how we can add white to a colour to make it lighter, and the more white we add, the lighter the shade becomes.

We started by painting a white dot in the middle of our page. Then we used the second lightest shade and painted a circle around the white dot.

We continued doing this until we had used all the shades of our colour, then we painted the rest of our page in the darkest shade.

The beauty of this lesson is that the students don't have to watch their paint brushes as they change shades! I love lessons like this as it can get pretty messy when you need to constantly wash your paint brush a million times a lesson!

We used a flicking technique to create little stars in our sky. I added some water to my white paint and got the kids to flick the paint on their paint brushes onto their page. Make sure that you do this OUTSIDE as it can get quite messy! But the kids had an absolute ball doing it :)

The final step was the trees. I cut up different lengths of cardboard and got the kids to dip the edges in black paint to create our trees. I made sure I told the children that the base of the tree must come off the page- there are no such thing as floating trees!

I must admire, I love walking into my class and seeing this display :)

Keep Smiling!
Miss A

Creative Writing- If I won a million dollars...

One thing I really enjoy doing is jazzing up our creative writing stories with a fun art activity. Inspired by St Patricks Day, this week I incorporated our 'If I won a million dollars' creative writing with a 'Pot of Gold' art activity!

The children first completed their good copy and illustrations. For the pots of gold you need thick cardboard so guess who stayed back one Friday afternoon wrestling a stanley knife through chunks of cardboard to create 19 pot templates? ME! The end result was totally worth it though :)

Using PVA glue, we glued pasta shells, lima beans and rice on the top of our pot. I made sure I got students to fill the entire section and to full in any blank spots with rice.

When the top had dried, I used gold spray paint to cover the entire area and give the illusion of gold. I then got the children to paint their pots grey.

I gave the top one more spray of gold to create a 'glowing' effect at the top of the pot. The students then added a dollar sign and used some lighter grey paint to create the effect of light reflecting off the pot. 

 I laminated the students work, added a bit of gold glitter to the edges and TA DA!! A fantastic looking creative writing piece :)

Miss A