Fairy Houses

This project was inspired by the series of books about Fairies and their homes by author/illustrator Tracy Kane.  If you haven't checked out her books, you really should.  They are just magical books. 

This project was completed over several class sessions and was done with Kindergarteners.  Really, though, I could see this easily being modified up for older grades. 

We started with painting sky and grass.  I also reviewed tints with them.  They were given white, green and blue and had to choose which to tint - the sky or the grass.  Most automatically tinted the sky because they wanted "sky blue" in their picture.

Yes, that's carpeting.  My art room had carpet. 

We'd run out of room on the drying rack and had to use the floor of the back closet to dry our paintings.

Day 2 of the project was painting the houses.  I put out trays of red, white and brown for them.  We painted Fly Amanitas (otherwise known as that red mushroom with the white spots which is so popularly used in fantasy art). 

I use Styrofoam lunch trays (5 bucks for 25 at WalMart) for paint trays.  Keeps the paint compartmentalized and when using limited color pallets it gives the kids a place to color mix. 

I let them decide how many "houses" they wanted to paint and how they arrange them.

We used the brown to paint windows and doors.

I freely admit to flaking on the pictures during fairy making days (it took two sessions).  My apologies on that.  We used multicultural papers for the bodies and then used wallpaper sample books for the fairy cloths and wings.  They got to decide how many fairies they wanted as well.  A few kids even added fairy dogs for their fairy families. Here's what the finished display looked like:

Absolutely adorable!

Signage

I am currently working off a cart in one building but am still in a classroom in the other school.  Due to this the signs I make for myself can be posted on a bulletin board, or stuck to the side of my art cart with magnets. 

Since our curriculum is based around the Elements of Art I made these up a while ago:

This is where they were last year when I had a room.

All my signs are laminated for longevity.  Although, they are starting to show their age.  I would love to remake them, but to save budget money the town took away our color printers.  Everything routes through to the copiers now.  All black and white - no more color!

If your system is anything like mine, you have the dreaded Essential Questions.   Our district requires that every single lesson have the Essential Questions posted.  Not so much for ourselves or the kids, but so visiting administrators can know at a glance what we're working on.  Our art department wrote universal ones that tied back to the elements.  We've since had to update those yet again but I thought I would post what we originally came up with.

What types of signs are you required to have in your classroom?  Is there anything curriculum linked you must have on display?

More From What's a Penguin to Think When He Turns Pink?

I must apologise once again for being gone so long.  Real life interfered on a scope I couldn't predict.  However, I am back now and am ready to start posting again.  

I realize that this is terribly off season, but I'm going to post an update on on previous post which you could find here: Penguins, penguins and more penguins.  

These were the pictures I didn't get around to post before.  

Cutting and Gluing the bodies.

I admit, the yellow tint makes it look more like a chicken then a penguin but it still came out cute.

Some of the best ones were the ones where texture had been scratched into the paint with the end of the brush.

Instead of white glue, I use the Elmer's Blue Gel Glue.  The bottles are SO much easier to unclog.

Belly attached and now working on the eyes.

This one is finished!

All of these came from my other first grade class.  We only have two of every grade in our school.

The finished bulletin board.

I seriously love the expression on these.

The pink one looks like he's glaring at the blue one.  The blue one looks like he's done something shifty.

This girl couldn't resist giving her penguin hair.  Love the rainbow belly on the one next to her.

Students were supposed to match the flippers to the body, but it didn't always work.  Ah well, they're all still cute!

My next few posts will be me catching up on things I meant to get to.  Once I'm caught up you can look forward to brand new lessons!