Kindergarten Cherry Blossom Trees

Here's what we've been up to in kindergarten!  We've completed two of the three projects in my cherry blossom unit, and ironically, it aligned up with one of the common core listening strands that kindergarten just started in class!  On the second day of my unit, one of the teachers asked me if I was still doing cherry blossoms with my students...I told her yes and she said that it was perfect timing because they were doing the plant unit.  In one of the resources they are using, there were pictures of cherry blossom trees and the students knew what they were before she even started talking about it!  

On the first day, we looked at my power point and ended on the picture below.  We talked about what the tree trunk looks like versus the branches, and we also looked at the way the branches come together.  To make a long story short, we draw realistic looking trees using the letters "Y" and "V".  

For our intro project to cherry blossom trees, we did the pop bottle stamp cherry blossom trees that I'm sure you've seen on Pinterest.  You can see our results on Artsonia.  I do have to say that I don't think the stamping part turned out as great as the photo on Pinterest...I read somewhere that you shouldn't use a lot of paint to dip the bottles in, but I had to.  Maybe it's because I used water bottles instead of the big 2-liter bottles...

On the second day, we took a practice day, or in other words, my "acquiring and integrating" lesson.  On the smartboard, I had the students walk me through drawing a cherry blossom tree.  Then, we reviewed and referred back to the craftsmanship rubric to talk about backgrounds.  One of the things I've noticed lately is that the kinders tend to color the sky and ground OVER THE TOP of their trees and details.  Then, they try to draw more details in over the top, so I specifically talked about drawing their tree and background details before coloring.  We also talked about why we should color the details before we color the sky and grass.  For some reason, they were very hesitant to draw lots of flowers, but I suppose what they did is probably better than the cloud on top of their trees!

Today, we started the third and final project in the cherry blossom unit.  For this project, I didn't do a review of how to draw the trees...I just had students raise their hands to tell me the steps.  I put my example I had previously drawn on the board and let the kids go to town.  

Then, I pulled out some blue watercolor paint and introduced them to painting with watercolors.  This is the first time this year that I am painting with watercolor with kindergarten, so I feel it was a good way to introduce it to them since we are only using one color.  Next class, we will finish these up by crumpling pink and white tissue paper to make the flowers.