She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain, kids song by Pamela Sunshine

I had nearly forgotten about this fun song, the kids just love the actions. We did it the other day. So much fun. There are lots of other great songs on my youtube channel, PamelaSunshineTV. 
You can subscribe to it for updates on new songs etc.

Primary Crafts for Valentines Day or Friendship Theme

It takes a while for me to get my pictures uploaded. Report cards and trips to the aquarium, teaching life, get in the way of the blog. I hope you like some of these ideas and it is nice to know they can be applied to the theme of friendship.
We made the hats as part of our Valentine's Day celebration and created the banners a few days before so our classroom looked festive.
I cut many different sized hearts ahead of time and showed the students how to cut smaller hearts out of the middle of a bigger heart. They enjoyed cutting out their own hearts as well.
I hope you have some fun with your students with these ideas.

We made hats for our Valentines Party

We made these Valentine Banners to hang up in our room. Lots of cutting and sticking.

Close up of a hat, each one was different, according to the imagination of the child.

Some chose to add some writing. This one translates as, 'I Love everyone'

Multi Media Snowmen using Paint, Paper, Fabric and More.

As part of our celebration of winter we made some snowmen. We started by painting the bodies, and the snow covered ground.  The next day we added paper eyes and buttons, I have used real buttons in the past.  Then cut out scarves and hats using fabric sample books.  Some children chose to add orange carrot noses, one student a cup of coffee, some added glasses and headphones, it was up to each student to create their snowman's personality. They love saying, "we can do whatever we want because it is Art!" I celebrate this sense of personal power over their creation. 

I hope you enjoy these snow characters and get a sense of the fun we had making them.

A

Where The Wild Things Are Art Ideas

We read Maurice Sendak's popular story, Where the Wild Things Are and got some great inspiration for doing art and writing. I will share our writing activities in another post.

I got this great art idea from IncredibleArt.org
Submitted by Jeryl Hollingsworth of La France Elementary, La France, SC it was the perfect way to explore texture and discuss the illustrations found in "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak.
Here are some pictures of what we created. I modeled drawing a wild thing on the board, and we discussed the features, and how to create texture etc.
Then they used crayon as suggested and did a paint wash over the wild thing. I added black outlines with a felt and then they cut out their wild thing. The next step was to create the background and they used pastels and paint for this.
Then we stuck the wild thing onto the background and displayed them.

We also are working on a big wall frieze. We still have some trees to add onto our big wall picture, but this will give you an idea how things are progressing. Here is a video of some of the children painting.

Carefully cutting out a wild thing.

 

Our Big Wall Wild Things Display

Kids song: The Banana Boat Song sung by Pamela Sunshine

My kids at school love singing this song. The 'huh' part just spontaneously happened one day and became integral to the way we do it. I hope you enjoy it and introduce it to the children in your world.

11 Surprising Benefits of Play

Here is an amazing article on the benefits of play by Dr. Michele Borba. She has published several books on parenting.
11 Surprising Benefits of Play

Chinese New Year Crafts and Parade

We had lots of fun making dragons and swishy wands for our Chinese New Year Parade around the school hallways. Every year all the primary students love the noisy, boisterous parade, with crashing tambourines and drums.

We made masks.  First we coloured the dragons and then cut them out and stuck them on a paper plate. After that we glued on brightly coloured strips of construction paper.  We needed lots of glue to make them stick. Then we put a cardboard strip across the back as a handle, this was stapled on with adult help.
I got the template for the dragons in this post from Animal Jr and  CraftJr

This is what they turned out like. It was enjoyable choosing which colours to add.

 We put them up on the bulletin board until we needed them for the parade.

 We also made some Dragons with cut out heads and tails stuck on an acordian body and two straws for the children to hold and manipulate the puppet.
Some good ideas for Chinese New Year ideas can also be found at  Activity Village

 Then we had the parade with all the other primary classes. Lots of smiles. We made wands out of construction paper rolled up tightly and stapled strips of crepe paper to the end for a swirly wand to wave and we walked.