Snowmen at night

Doesn’t everyone have a Snowmen at Night lesson these days??? This is one of my favorite books- it has a great wintry vibe, but without Santa! The illustrations are beautiful! The story has a great rhyming pattern to it. I have read this book to so many classes that I know it by heart. The kids seems quite intrigued by the fact that I can read the story without looking at the pages!

For this project I began by reading the kiddos (2nd grade) the story. On the first day of the lesson I have them a piece of 9×12 watercolor paper. They wrote their names in the back with pencil and then came over to my tray of water and dipped their paper. They did a wet on wet painting using the cool colors. They sprinkled a little salt on their paintings to give them a really cool added effect. The next class we looked at the beautiful illustrations and I demonstrated how to use oil pastels to shade the snowmen so they appeared to have a shadow on one side. The kids did a great job adding lots of little details to bring their paintings to life. I love the little cups of cocoa in their hands!

Bright flowers on a snowy day

I thought I would post this project I did a few years ago to brighten up a really snowy day... And week here in NJ!  It has been snowing quite a bit; we had a half day, and a snow day this week, and it snowed again yesterday! 

For this project the kids first started by making a pretty piece of painted paper.  They did a wet on wet painting and sprinkled it with salt.  We let them dry and they cut out a vase shape.  They divided their paper and had to create a pattern on the bottom half for the "tablecloth"they glued on their vase, few flowers and painted them with watercolor and hen used one color paint for the background.  I hung these up for our yearly art show and hey really looked awesome.