Rainbow Yarn Craft

This is a craft one of my recent graduates taught kids at our school's while teachers were prepping for the new school year. She looked after the staff children and taught them how to make this craft. She saw the craft on Instagram.  All of the supplies she purchased from the Dollar store!

Needed: thick rope, yarn (thin), hot glue gun, wire or pipe cleaners, scissors, tape

Here's a useful TUTORIAL and a Youtube TUTORIAL

Cut the rope into as many layers as you want your rainbows. Make them each slightly shorter than the rest. Wrap or hot glue on a piece of wire to each rope so it can bend. 

She used three ropes as the youngest kid in the group is only in Grade 1.

Choose your yarn colours and wrap each rope, leaving the ends free.

 

Once all the ropes are wrapped, hot glue them all together. 

You can add a loop of yarn on the back for hanging. Unravel the ends a bit and trim or leave them wild!

I think they're so cute and stylish!

 

Observational Drawings

Observational drawing is one of my favourite ways to 'teach' drawing to my Grad 4,5 and 6 students. 

It forces the kids to really slow down, look at the small details 

and 'draw what they see, not what they think they see'. 

For this lesson, I just grabbed a variety of leaves from a park near my school. The kids chose which leaves they liked and placed them on a sheet of white paper. This allows them to see the cast shadows easier. I turn off all the lights in my room and just use the natural light from my windows.

I show them how to do a contour drawing of line first, then once all the proportions are correct, to slowly start adding shading. 

This student tried to add water droplets to her leaves for a more naturalistic look.

The week before we did drawings of Werther's Original candies!

 

Indian Peacock Watercolour

This is a project I teach when our Grade 4's are learning about India during one of their curricular Social Studies unit. Grade 4 is one of my favourite grades to teach (in Alberta, Canada) because it's Social Studies curriculum teaches a number of countries around the world, so I can connect art projects very easily. 

This watercolour project was inspired by a henna tattoo of a peacock I saw one day.

In 1963, the peacock was declared the National Bird of India because of its rich religious and legendary involvement in Indian traditions. It is a symbol of grace, joy, beauty and love. The significance of peacock is attached to cultures of India, Far East, Ancient Persia, Greek and Christian. In Hinduism, the image of the god of thunder, rains and war, Indra, was depicted in the form of a peacock. (source)

So I demonstrated how to draw this elegant, stylized peacock. Then students created a decorative border. They outlined everything in Sharpie then painted these using watercolours. Once dry, I added some glitter to the borders for an extra decorative touch.

In this unit, we also made mehdi (henna) hands!

 

Freestyle Mondrian Drawings

This was a project my Grade 4 - 6 students completed during the last week of school in June. I wanted something simple but fun as we were ALL tired from this past year especially. Normally I do a Mondrian Animals project but this time I simply introduced his work and allowed the kids to make their own Mondrian inspired drawings- whatever subject matter they wanted They drew these in pencil then coloured them using markers. This took about 80 minutes to complete.