Seeing this project made my heart melt. This is a craft I saw in a kindergarten class. It’s a paper roller-coaster! The teacher talked about primary colors and then let them use strips of colored construction paper to build roller-coasters! They used card stock for the base and regular white glue to build the coaster. I just love it!
I took these pictures a few days after they did the project, so the paper isn’t as strong and got kinda floppy. Sorry!
Ok, let me be real with you. I’m not a great artist… not even close. But that doesn’t mean I can’t teach kids to enjoy drawing. Here are some links to pages to help you with this endeavor:
Printable pages to teach/encourage simple drawing
Drawing Animals (Web pages that show step by step)
Drawing owls (This project is a favorite of mine)
Simple animals (with printable, see below)
This is one of the easiest and cutest spring crafts I’ve seen in a long time (my friend Carol did this one). Grab some colored paper (preferably heavier than printer paper), paint, glitter, glue and muffin tin cups. It’s as easy as you think it is: cut out a flower shape and glue a muffin tin cup to the center. Decorate the petals with paint, crayons, markers, etc. Glue some glitter to the center of the muffin cup and then attach your own paper stem. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy!
I recently worked with an after-school program full of kindergarten boys who loved paper airplanes. the only problem is that they weren’t super great at making airplanes that flew far. They got discouraged with their airplane after throwing it a few times and seeing it land only a few feet away. So, they’d grab more paper and try again (folding it the exact same way). So the cycle would repeat itself until all the paper was gone. This seemed like a waste of paper to only use the airplane for 3 throws, so I decided to see what I could do to help these little guys appreciate their little planes, even though they didn’t fly very far. I used chalk to draw a line from which to throw the planes, and shapes on the ground with point values written inside. I taught the boys how to take turns throwing their planes from the line to see if they could hit a specific target. Since they were little, they didn’t care about the total points they earned, but had a blast seeing who could land on the targets with 100 points.
I made sure to have plenty of targets and many that were only a few feet away so the kids with wacky-folded planes would be able to participate. The boys were much more entertained. Mission accomplished!
This is probably one of the coolest art projects I’ve ever seen.
The idea is this: roll strips of construction paper into spirals and glue them onto foam board. This particular project was done as a whole class project where students wrote a wishes for the future of the school on the strips of paper before rolling and gluing them with tacky glue (gold bottle, white lid… it works the best). They called it “Wish Upon a Starry Night.” This would be a great activity after studying famous artists. You could use a smaller piece of foam board and use smaller strips of paper to make an individual art piece. It takes a while to complete, so plan more than 1 period for the project. If you have your class try this, I’d love to see how it turns out!
Here’s another fun craft my friend Carol showed us at our after school program. Even the big kids liked it (the girls thought it was cute and the boys wanted the cereal). We used the cereal Apple Jacks, but any O shaped cereal would work for the octopus tentacles. We found white glue works better than glue stick, and doing this on card stock is better than regular printer paper (since the glue makes printer paper too soggy). Enjoy!
Here’s the template:
A second grade teacher just submitted this fun craft! It can be made with any color paper, and turns out to be about 3 1/2 feet tall! Thank you!
Easter Bunny pattern 3 1-2 feet tall
6th graders tell me they don’t like to color… until I show them these geometric coloring pages. At the Charter school I’m currently working with, I don’t seem to be able to copy enough to keep up with the demand! (Everyone likes them… kindergarten through high school). There are lots of websites that have these for free, so just do a search for “geometric coloring pages” and you’ll find gobs.
Here’s one of my favorite websites to get geometric coloring pages!
Squarehead Teachers 