Valentine's Projects Galore

My classes got through a few Valentine's Day projects last week- here's a few of the highlights:

I have a special class on Fridays called "Storybook Art". It's an elective class elementary students from Grade 1-3 can choose to take. We read a story then make an art project inspired by it. Yesterday we read the cute book "Mouse's First Valentine".  The story was very simple and probably best suited to Grade 1, but oh well- the kids liked it and it has beautifully painted illustrations.

We created out little mouse first. I demonstrated on the whiteboard how to draw the mouse using basic shapes. Then they drew theirs on blue construction paper using white construction paper crayons. Then they coloured it in and cut it out.

To make the valentine, we cut a red heart slightly smaller than a white heart paper doily and glued them together.

Glue the mouse to the Valentine and write a message to someone you love!

Grade 6 students made heart chains inspired by this post from the blog "Kids Artists".

They really enjoyed it- I taught them how to draw a paper chain and then let them decide how they wanted to colour them. Most used markers and/or pencil crayons. This was a fairly time-consuming project, though, so most didn't finish last week.

My Grade 1 students made the classic craft: Heart Buddies. A pretty easy project for a day when kids are hyped up on sugar- we had sooo many treats brought to school yesterday...

I just precut strips of red and pink paper on my paper cutter for the arms and legs. I taught the kids how to accordion fold- great for fine motor skill development. Also a great lesson for teaching the classic technique of folding paper in half and drawing half a heart in order to get a symmetrical heart. I'm always surprised each year by how many students don't know how to do this.

My Grade 2's made patterned hearts. I had them make a folded symmetrical heart on white copy paper. Again, always surprised how many kids don't know how to do this, or they draw their half heart on the open side as opposed to the folded side and end up with two pieces...

Anyway, then they traced this onto white construction paper. They traced over this heart shape with my awesome KING SIZE Sharpies (they love these, lol). This creates a bold line. Then, they used a ruler to draw 4 lines dissecting their heart. They use a thin black line for this- we discussed contrast and line variety at this stage. We want to the big heart to really stand out. Then they created patterns within the heart. They coloured these with either markers or pencil crayons.