Kindness Quilts

I love doing collaborative projects and this one is a new favorite which I hope continues throughout the years.  The library media specialist and I noticed that we did similar projects and decided to combine them into an integrated lesson.  This is the blog post for my Bedtime Story Quilts.  
Our library media specialist does a Kindness quilt project with her first grade students based on the book The Kindness Quilt, a story of Random acts of kindness pictured on a paper quilt.  Students thought about ideas for their own on acts of kindness, created a drawing and used the iPads to photograph their drawing and record a sentence about their drawing.  The library media specialist then created QR codes for each of the groups. Students were able to scan the codes and listen to all of the projects.  
This year the kids read the story and brainstormed ideas during library time while working on the quilt in art.  The kids came to art with their planning sheet and I helped them create their  final drawing and border for the quilt.  We talked about zooming in and drawing larger for the final copy as well as adding details to illustrate their act of kindness.  The quilt squares were made using crayon resist.  We created patterns on white paper and then painted over them with liquid watercolors.  The finished pieces went back to the library where the kids photographed them and used the app Puppet Edu to record their sentences.  The kids did a great job and the quilts look beautiful in the hallway.  

Winter Cardinals Grade 1

I have been photographing the cardinals visiting my bird feeders this year and thought my first grade students would love to  see them.  After looking at the pictures and hearing stories about other backyard bird feeders we sketched some cardinals.  I had photographs for them to look at as well as some easy how to draw sheets I found on the internet.  Once the sketches were done we drew our final copy on blue construction paper and used tempera paint to add color. We looked at the cardinal photos and observed the different shades of red.  I mixed up a light, medium and dark shade for the kids to use when painting.  Once the paint dried we used cray-pas to add the branches.  We talked about a variety of trees you would see and the kids chose which ones they wanted to use.  We tried to blend different shades of the tree colors with the cray-pa.  The final detail was adding snow with white tempera paint. 

Bedtime Story Quilts

First graders do a concert every year at our school called Dreaming Around the World.  I thought this project would be great to go along with the bedtime theme.  We looked at Faith Ringgold's story quilts and talked about our favorite things about bedtime and then drew pictures about it.  We also looked at pattern and how to use lines to create patterns.  Each student had 5 strips of paper and used crayons to create patterns on them.  We painted a watercolor wash over them.  When they were dry I cut them up into 4 inch squares to use as the border.  Check out our finished artwork.  

Sun Faces

For this project we really focused on the process of coming up with ideas and trying to make our sun faces unique and different.  Often in class students are quick to use the first idea that they come up with.  I was trying to get them to slow down and brainstorm lots of ideas before settling on their favorite.  I made a worksheet that I thought might help them with this process.  I also showed them some terra cotta sun faces and we talked about how different they all were.  I didn't leave the sun faces out while they were drawing though because I wanted to try to get the most original ideas.  The kids came up with some great ideas and very different sun faces. I think taking the extra time to do a little more planning helped.

Here are the planning worksheets:

After our sun faces were finished we photographed and edited them on the ipad using the Popsicolor app.  It's a fun app that gives the look of watercolor and ink. The students enjoyed giving their artwork   another different and creative look.