Up and Coming projects...Kindergarten

Whew!  It feels like I fell off the face of the earth for a few days!  Besides being super busy with my YAM activities, I took a personal day on Tuesday.  It was meant to be a relaxing day spent with a friend of ours, however it ended up being a sleep-all-day-because-I'm-sick day! :(

My husband and I did manage to make it out to Watertown in the afternoon just so I could get out of my germ-infested house.  We bought some paint to paint the second bathroom and the hallway and I bought my outfit for pop art day on Thursday!  I'm SOOOO excited to wear my outfit!  Check back tomorrow to see it and hopefully the other great pop art outfits faculty and students will wear tomorrow!

Anyways, I want to share with you some of my up and coming projects that I have just started.  

Firstly, Kindergarten:

One of the Kindergarten teachers chose to teach her students about Eric Carle as part of my read-a-loud YAM activities.  These projects below are from my first year of teaching.  Back then, I thought these were awesome...now?  I want to hide my head in shame! So, I'm going to revamp this aquarium project to incorporate Eric Carle's techniques and his seahorse book. While I'm not going to use print-out coloring sheets, I am going to have the students use a tracer for this project. 

  

Students are going to start off by painting the plates with blue and white paint.  Then, they will paint their own grass using green and yellow.  When everything dries, they will cut the grass apart and glue it on the inside plate.  They will also paint a small piece of paper using fluorescent pinks and reds, and tissue paper.  When that dries, I'll have them trace two seahorses, cut them out and glue them to the inside of the aquarium.

Lastly, I think we'll add some real sand and seashells to the outside.  Class C and my special needs class started these yesterday while my sub was there, so I'll have some results to share soon!

The other two kindergarten classes will be doing a project based on the four seasons.  Their teachers decided to read about Monet.  Since he liked to paint outdoors at different parts of the day, I thought it would be a good way to talk about Monet in class, as well as connect with the Common Core listening strand.  

I haven't quite nailed down the project I'm going to do with these kinders, but I did give them a 6-square drawing test last class and I was very surprised at the number of students who resorted back to the rectangle tree with a green cloud on top!  I asked them to draw a tree in winter, spring, summer, fall, a flower, and a rainbow.  Out of the two other kinder classes, I'd say only 3 students used the 'y' and 'v' technique we practiced with the cherry blossom trees!  Good thing we're going to review it!