Morning Glories!

I was inspired by  Carolyn at Kindergarten:Holding Hands and Sticking Together to grow morning glories in our classroom.  These flowers climb up your window (or the string you put up) and open each morning.  Hers are awesome!  I think she planted them very early (like in February).  

Ours are almost to the top of the strings but so far, no flowers.  We have four more weeks so I am hopeful.  They have been lots of fun to watch grow!  The vines twirl around the strings and seem to grow several inches every night.  

We also planted carrot seeds and bean seeds.  We observed the beans in baggies on the window before Spring Break but I planted the leftover seeds in dirt a week or two ago.  They sprouted quickly and I put some strings for them in case they get big enough. The beans grow very quickly.

Lima Bean Sprouts

We made some awesome flower pictures.  The kids made a circle using oil pastels, then added the petals, leaves, and a few vines.  They used watercolors to paint however they liked, all the way to the outside of the paper.  I love how they turned out!

Teacher Appreciation and Mother's Day

We are so spoiled at our school!  All week we are treated to gifts, chocolate, food, flowers, and love notes.  It is a fun week!

First, the PTA decorated our school.  I love it!  I am hoping it will stay up through the end of the year (28 more days!).

Door to the teachers' room

Hallway

Preschool bulletin board that fit the theme!

Teachers' Room

Boxes filled with kisses

 

The room mothers decorated each door (I forgot to get a picture of my door!)  It was a great week!

We scrambled to get our Mother's Day presents finished, wrapped, and hopefully home safely.  The kids grew marigolds in a cup (so we placed them in a ziplock bag to travel home, wrapped in tissue, and inside a decorated bag).  They added cute butterfly tags, and a handprint/flower card.  I have been assessing, assessing, assessing so we had to squeeze it all in.  

Happy Mother's Day!

April Showers bring May Flowers!

We made some rainbow clouds.  The children cut out their own clouds and added the tissue paper in rainbow order, then added some sparkly glitter (everything is better with glitter!).

The flowers were also made with tissue paper.  I mixed up some water and glue and the kids painted it on the white background, stuck on the tissue paper, then added more glue water on the top to stick everything down.  I love these!

 We had high school students in to teach some extra art projects on Art Extravaganza.  This year my kids got to find animals in their scribbles.

 They made some darling caterpillars.

They learned about mosaic techniques to cover symbols representing the four seasons.

The kids had a great time!  The high school students did a great job presenting and getting the kids to express their ideas in art.

Happy Spring!

This week we got to fingerpaint!  Yay!  Most of my students told me they had never fingerpainted before.  I am sad to hear it.  The focus of preschool has now become more academic and many traditional art projects are disappearing in favor of worksheets.  Sigh.  I can't wait for that pendulum to swing back again! 

 

Each student was given a sheet of fingerpaint paper and one color to cover their paper.  Then they could make designs, swirls, pictures, or write their name in the paint.  After everyone made a paper and they dried overnight, we tore them up!  The kids got to make some pretty spring flowers to brighten our room.

We finally have some narcissus blooming in my yard!  Spring is here!  Only 48 more days of school.  Because of the snow days, we will be in school until June 20th.

St. Patrick's Day Art in Kindergarten

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  It looks like we may be celebrating a day late (more snow is expected tonight!).  Luckily, we have been reading about leprechauns and rainbows all week.  We have enjoyed making a variety of rainbow projects, too.

We made pots of gold at both the beginning and the end of the fingerprint rainbow!  We used watercolor paints (I poured water on the bigger cakes of watercolor paints to make them moist) and they were able to make the rainbows all by themselves.  I made a tracer for them to make the pots (I couldn't find any cardstock so I quickly used the middle of a paper plate.  Ha!).  Then lots of gold glitter and tada!

 We also used the dotters to make a rainbow on half of a paper plate.  This works great because the shape of the rainbow is there for them to follow.  They all turned out great.  My kids this year seemed to know a lot about rainbows already (from preschool?) so we had lots of fun.

 So, I hope you have a lucky day!  Enjoy trapping leprechauns and dancing a few jigs!  We have one more rainbow project to make whenever we return to school (could be tomorrow.  The weatherman has been wrong before, right?).  Five day weeks seem very long now.  Very.  Long.

Kindergarten Dental Health Art Activities

We all know that Kindergarten is the place where many children will lose their first tooth.  It is endlessly fascinating to them.  They love to tell you when their tooth is lose and show you how it wiggles.  Fun stuff.

February was Dental Health Month.  We read plenty of fun tooth fairy books, talked about keeping our teeth healthy, and made some cute art projects.

The Tooth Fairy is a freebie from FallintoFirst.com.  I don't often do so many tracers but I think they turned out so sweet!  And sparkly!

I drew this tooth out with a marker and then we copied it.  I let the kids make rainbow teeth!  hehe.  I know it doesn't make sense but aren't they so happy?

Hope you had a fun Dental Health Month, too!

Dr. Seuss Ideas for Kindergarten and a Freebie!

March definitely came in like a lion!

Next week is Dr. Seuss's birthday!  We will have fun activities all week.  Um.  Maybe.  More snow is expected on Monday.  But we shall persevere and get some fun activities in there somehow.

It is also the first week of the MSA testing in third through fifth grades for our school (and all of the schools in Maryland).  So there will be plenty of kids wearing their pajamas backward and searching the sky for flakes.  I am so done with winter.  Bleah!


School wide, we have older kids come in and read Dr. Seuss books to another grade level.  The fifth graders go all out and create Dr. Seuss games to play.  We have daily Dr. Seuss trivia contests on the announcements.  We encourage the kids and staff to dress as Dr. Seuss characters on March 3 (the day we get back to school if we are snowed out).  And we read lots of Dr. Seuss books.

For our math tubs this week, we have a few fun ideas.

We will make a One Fish, Two Fish adding book.  The kids get a quarter sheet book with five pages of copy paper stapled inside.  They roll two dice.  The first dice they will make with red fingerprints and the second will be the blue fish.  They add tails and fins and eyes.  They write the number sentence and solve it.  And repeat.  They are really cute.

We make necklaces that have addition problems on a Cat in the Hat hat.  They solve the problems, color the hats, cut out the hats, fold them over and glue them on the yarn.  This one can be hard for some of my kids so I help them with the cutting.  We differentiate the math problems.

We play Roll a Rainbow hat.  We made up simple directions.  You can find the hat here.

Roll a Rainbow Hat

We also have some Dr. Seuss addition papers, a roll and color the hats game, and a Green Eggs and Ham game (made commercially) that I will get out if we need them.

For our art activities, we will make an elephant handprint from Horton Hears a Who.   Here is a cute picture from catholicicing.  (We will not be making a political statement with ours.  I just think it is cute!)

We make an adorable Cat in the Hat.

We will make Thing One and Thing Two out of popsicle sticks like these. I found them on pinterest and cannot find their owner.  The link says google search.  If they are yours, please let me know.  Thanks.
They are so cute!

We let the kids make a rhyming hat with the at word family, too.  I think that's it.  I have more March ideas on my March Kindergarten Art pinterest page if you want to check it out.