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Arts Integration. A Crafty Autumn Leaf Project for Kids (and Adults) Photo: Ksu/ kokokoKIDS Monday in my home means one thing--arts and crafts. My daughter and two of her homeschooled friends spend the morning with us learning about all sorts of ways to be creative and express themselves through art. Teaching (in our respective areas of expertise) to a small group of kids is called a co-op and it is one way in which homeschooled children learn. For a recent craft, we decided to make leaf animals. It turned out to be a simple project that let us hold onto autumn's colors for a little big longer -- while opening up lots of opportunities to teach the girls about science and nature.
First took a walk though a local park to collect different sized and shaped leaves. Making the Leaf Animals Once the leaves were pressed, we were ready to turn them into colorful animal artwork. 1. A leaf bird. A leaf moose. 2. The projects in progress. 3. 4. Learn While You Work Working alongside your kids is the perfect opportunity to teach them all about leaves and trees. 1. Paint Chip Phonics. I found a great idea on The Snail’s Tail. She really does a good job of explaining it on her site, but I’ll try to do it here too. The idea is to practice the consonants, blends, digraphs and common word families. I have to admit I was a tad intimidated to walk into Lowe’s and grab a whole pile of paint chips, but the lady was talking to me the whole time and didn’t seem to mind.
(Note: I did try Home Depot first, but didn’t like their paint chips, they were mostly 1 color on a card and didn’t have the ones with the hole cut out. Though later, I decided the hole was too small and used a 1 1/4″ hole punch to make it bigger.) Here is the list of the phonograms she used. Shopping List: 13 long cards (6 colors to a card) or 26 short cards (3 colors to a card) for consonants, blends, and diagraphs34 cards that have the hole cut out…12 if there are 3 colors on a card. Here is a sample of the families, blends and digraphs (you can click on the images to see them larger): Consonants: Blends: TeachKidsArt. Art lessons for kids.
Circle painting. We were asked to complete a 10-foot panel for a Principal's luncheon with the ACE (Arts & Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County) recently which needed to depict the art form of "Media Arts"...of which I do very little. I do not have a bank of computers or iPads (YET!!!) So we needed to get creative with our approach! I decided to do this special project with a group of 6 2nd grade self-contained ESE students. We watched a video on Circle Painting (www.circlepainting.org) and went to town creating our large panel (pictured above). I also added the words "Media Arts", our school name, and the website name. It hung in my classroom for a week or so before I had to surrender it to the ACE. The logistics of that project were simple, and because I only had 6 kiddos working on it it was even EASIER!
The following week I gave each of them their own large paper (18x24) and did the same thing with the paints and brushes so they could make their own paintings. KinderArt - Free Art Lessons and Lesson Plans, Projects and Art Education Information for Toddlers, Elementary, Middle and Secondary School. Technology enhanced education. Five Ways to Create Word Clouds. This morning at the Massachusetts School Library Association's conference (a fun conference that I highly recommend) Pam Berger presented some good ideas for working with primary source documents and Web 2.0 tools.
One of the ideas that she shared and others elaborated on was the idea of using word clouds to help students analyze documents. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document. Here are five tools that you and your students can use to create word clouds. ABCya! Offers a beautiful word cloud generator. Like all word cloud generators you simply copy and paste chunks of text into the text box to have a word cloud created. Tagul is a free word cloud generator that offers the option to link every word in your word cloud to a Google search. Word It Out creates word clouds out of any text that you paste into the word cloud generator. Disclosure: ABCya!
FlipCards - Flashcard app for memory training for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Infographics. Teachwithyouripad.wikispaces. Gooru | A Free Search Engine for Learning | Sign up, Sign in. Art lessons for kids.