Winter Projects

Winter projects bring lots of excitement, chaos, and mess to the art room, but students have so much fun creating with new materials. Kindergarteners created snowmen from circular sponge stamps and white tempera paint on 4"x4" blue paper. Then, they built houses for their snowmen to live from popsicle sticks, wood glue and a splash of color using tempera paint. 

We also experimented with mini winter landscapes by tearing small 5"x6" drawing paper into three strips to create our foreground, middle ground, and background. One edge of each torn strip was traced with blue or purple chalk pastels, and then, smeared to give it a hazy look. Students overlapped the torn strips to create the illusion of hills and glued the strips in place to blue construction paper.

Second and first graders learned special tricks used by artists to create the illusion of space in their own winter landscapes such as overlapping, changing the size of objects (smaller objects in background, larger objects in foreground) as well as the placement of objects on the paper (Lower objects in foreground, higher objects in background), and changing the value of objects so it appears lighter and hazier as it recedes into the background.

Second graders used double loaded and dry brush techniques to create their trees, while first graders cut their trees for their winter landscapes from green construction paper.

Recycled Snowmen are a tradition in second grade as a winter project. It gives second grade students the opportunity to use glue guns safely and choose materials that would be most appropriate to use with glue guns or craft glue such as buttons, pom pom, fleece, sequins, scrap paper, etc.

Recyced snowman ornaments and final touches on Winter Landscapes

2nd grade students started their snowman ornament made from recycled jar and can lids. Now, these cans weren't opened with just any can opener, but a special pampered chef can opener that leaves the edges safe to touch. Students sanded the lids and painted white with tempera paint. I thought sanding would be enough to rough the surface to make the paint stick, but we still had flaking paint so I added a layer of white spray paint for coverage. A hammer and Phillips head screw driver work great for adding holes to the lids to connect with silver or white pipe cleaners. 2nd graders will be adding collage items with craft glue and hot glue to complete their snowman.

Kindergarteners are spending their last week on winter landscapes adding glitter, sequins and other details with construction paper crayons.