Christmas Watercolour Cards for Animal Shelter

One of my Grade 12 art students runs a watercolour cards class with me. She's a very talented watercolour painter and wanted to give back to the younger grades and the community by co-teaching this class with me. It's called "Watercolor Cards for the Community." We make painted cards for different groups in our community. For December, we chose a cat rescue organization located in a small town just outside our city. 

Here are some of the cute cards that our Grade 7 - 9 students made: 

Here are some of the rescue cats I volunteer with after work!

More cat pics because they are just so darn cute!

 

Puffy Paint Christmas Art

I had my current Grade 8 class way back when they were in Grade 2. Back then, we did the puffy paint ghost project (see HERE). To this day, they bring up this project and beg to do it again. So this week, they begged to do puffy paint Christmas art. Being the last week before break, I, along with other teachers, am utterly exhausted. I gave them the ingredients and told them to go for it themselves. So they organized themselves, mixed up batches, colored them with liquid watercolours, and created these charming artworks. 

Puffy paint recipe: 50/50 parts shaving cream and white glue. Mix together in a bowl. That's it!

 

Nutcracker Landscape

A magical Nutcracker art lesson that I found on the Deep Space Sparkle website. 

See the lesson and all the steps HERE.  I love how these all turned out!

I give my students the choice of using a template or drawing their own character- about half the class usually decides to design their own.

Some Grade 4,5,6 results!

 

Polish Wycinanki Evergreen Tree Paper Cuts-outs

This is a great lesson for the last couple of weeks before school lets out for Christmas vacation. It involves only paper, a hole punch, scissor and glue sticks. Very little prep but yet still results in gorgeous artwork- my kind of lesson for right before the holidays when we're all tired!

I showed my Grade 5 students some examples of Polish wycinanki. These folk paper cutouts were used in the 1800's by Polish peasants to decorate their houses. It was a cheap craft for them as it only involved scissors and any type of paper. The cutouts are symmetrical with nature designs and geometric shapes and are also used for occasions such as Christmas.  They are also sometimes layered (different coloured cutouts placed one on top of another) to make a more intricate design.

We did trees in the Kurpie tradition: these are from the Kurpie region of east-central Poland are single coloured, often black or red, and cut from a piece of paper that is folded once or several times, making the image symmetrical.

You can see our Lowicz style (colourful layers) Christmas trees project I 

did a couple of years ago HERE.

See all the steps in my previous post on this lesson HERE

These are Grade 6 examples:

 

Paper Bag Snowflakes

Do you decorate your classroom for the holidays?  These paper bag snowflakes make large and beautiful decorations to jazz up any winter holiday get together.

I led a crafting session with teachers at my school after school one day. These are going to be hung as decorations for our staff Christmas/Holiday party. There are loads of tutorials on YouTube and Instagram and Tiktok. You simply hot glue 8-9 paper bags together, cut out a design, then open up and glue the ends together. You can buy different colours and sizes of paper bags for more variety. I just bought plain brown ones from my local Dollarama. I also ordered white bags from an art catalog- the paper was different and worked less well than the brown ones for some reason. 

These would also be fun to make with a class. But, using 30 hot glue guns at once isn't fun, so you can also use glue sticks or white glue. But I would weight them with a heavy book for 30 minutes before cutting and unfolding. 

I have to still hot glue them closed and add string, but it was really fun making these with colleagues. 

I sent some photos to my friend (who's very artistic) who then made some with her relatives!