Above is a caterpillar craft that I taught during my student teaching. Kindergartener's spent the first day of this project coloring abstract shapes, line and colors onto white paper with crayons. Then they painted with watercolors on top of their crayon designs.
On the second day, students then traced around giant leaf stencils and cut them out of green construction paper. Then they cut elliptical shapes from their decorated papers and assembled these onto their "leaf frames" with paste. The last step was to add eyes and line details to their caterpillars and leaves with a black magic marker.
"Two girls A.R. and G.H., ages 9 and 11, took my puppet workshop. After
graduating from the advance level they performed The Very Hungry
Caterpillar all on their own without any help. A.R. plays the
caterpillar and the butterfly. G.H. handled all the props. They did this
video in one take, I am so proud of them!" from hagley productions
Cut out the two sides of the frog and paste them together, with a cardboard in between. After pasting the two sides back to back, with the cardboard in between, cut the inside contours, such as between the legs and the arms. Then punch out the holes for the string and fasten the string to a small stick to complete the trapeze. Hold the frog by this stick as you make him go through his performance. Besides the two ways of hanging from the trapeze shown in the sketches, he can also bend his body and hook on (at the places marked X) by one leg. Or he may slide up and down, with the string passing through those places marked with X's.
Need to draw lots of pond life? Here are some step-by-step drawing
guides for those of you who need to learn about dragon-flys,
water-lilies, frogs, and tadpoles.
Teachers may download the image above and print one for each student.
Ask the students to give the King of all pollywogs a crown, scepter,
perhaps even a robe. Then challenge them to doodle thousands of
tadpoles, frogs and toads surrounding their King.
"A Year With Frog and Toad" is a musical written by brothers Robert (music) and Willie Reale (book and lyrics), based on the Frog and Toad children's stories written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
The musical follows the woodland adventures of two amphibious friends, a
worrywart toad and a perky frog, with their assorted colorful hopping,
crawling and flying companions, over the course of a year. The show
broke new ground by bringing professional children's theatre to
Broadway, sparking the interest of the age 3-to-10 set.
Arnold Lobel's daughter, Adrianne Lobel, commissioned a musical based on her father's characters. She also designed the set, based on her father's writings. Her husband, actor Mark Linn-Baker,
adapted the stories into a theatrical script, and later played Toad in
the musical's Broadway debut. The intimate, 5-actor piece is frequently
played by community theatre companies.
Below are student examples of three Giant Easter Egg pictures. Although each example is created with a distinct drawing or painting method, all of the pictures have the same theme. Sometimes crafts on the web are mislabeled under categories that use a method of working to describe the theme. It is the theme that is the subject of an art lesson and it is the method that is the verb describing an art project's process. When art educators are required to write lesson plans, they learn that the title of an art lesson includes the subject and that the description includes the process.
But on the web, teachers, crafters and companies selling their ideas and product will list the methods as the subject in order to drive traffic under different words and phrases to their web pages. This is why it is advantageous for teachers to search under both the method or the theme when surfing the web for any sort of craft/art idea.
This giant Easter Egg was crafted using a popular wax resist method. Young students learn to color with firm pressure onto drawing paper before painting a watery solution of colored paint over the surface of their wax colors. The paint will then leave traces of painted paper where ever the crayons have not been applied. The use of this method is very popular in grade school because it shows students how they can use art materials and also develops their eye-hand coordination.
This giant Easter Egg sponge painting requires young students to use unconventional tools in the act of painting. Sponges are easy for little hands to manipulate and these hold all kinds of sticky, messy paints made from inexpensive mixtures that kindergarten teachers can quickly shake together without investing large sums of cash in a art project. Small children do not generally produce art that will be kept forever by anyone other than their parents so, it is important to use materials that may be expendable but also fun to work with. The key to developing student performance in art is repetition and inexpensive materials ensure that the activity is repeated frequently.
This giant, bright colored Easter egg was painted with watercolor paints and a soft camel hair brush. First the student used a black marker to draw her whimsical butterfly, fish and flowers. Then she painted in her picture with bright, festive colors. I have discovered that very young students produce marvelous watercolor paintings but grow apprehensive about the resulting finished product as they age. This is because the younger an art student is, the less inhibited they are about "how" their artwork looks. Their inhibitionsare the unfortunate result of growing old, I'm afraid.
Above is my teachers sample. We used magic markers to cover the mask with bright patterns and colors.
I crafted simple butterfly masks with my kids at the school last week. I traced my butterfly pattern onto inexpensive paper plates and cut these out ahead of time. The eye holes were located in the upper oval shapes of the top of my butterfly's wings.
This simple mask project is perfect for kindergarteners. They also loved to skip about the room and pretend to be flying in a garden with their masks on!
