A Busy Friday - Valentine's Day Art and 100s Day

Wowzers !! Friday was a busy day for us. Not only did we celebrate Valentine’s Day but we also had our 100s Day celebration. It was a fun filled day and I was proud of by kiddos for keeping it together and not being to wild and crazy (especially when candy was involved).

This past week we finished up our Valentine’s art and I got it displayed on the walls. Here are some pictures of the final products!

For this first project we worked on our cutting skills. No tracers were used to make the hearts, just paper folding and cutting. I was impressed with how well they turned out.

To link hearts, I showed my students how to make a slit in one of the hearts and then to link it around a second heart. When they glued the hearts to the background you could not tell where they cut the heart.

For our second project, I gave students a square piece of paper. In the middle they traced a heart shape. Using a ruler, they drew vertical lines over the entire page. They chose 2 colors to create their heart picture with. They had to alternate colors and when they got to a line they had to change the color they were using.

Tip: have them put a color dot on each section. This will help them make sure they are using the correct color.

This was the biggest hit in my class. Students LOVED to see their final product and the different color choices of their classmates.

I got the inspiration for our door art from the Bright Ideas Blog Hop I was part of recently. Blair, from Change the World One Lesson at a Time, had this brilliant idea.

I was very giddy about the project I planned for 100s Day. A couple days before I took all my students pictures and used the app Aging Booth to age them so they looked older. I couldn’t stop giggling as I was working on them. I then put their pictures on a worksheet. You can see a picture of it below. I couldn’t post their pictures here (they are super cute by the way) so I made one with my scary picture.

I knew that they would all want to see each others’ pictures and I didn’t want chaos when I handed out the worksheets so I created a PowerPoint to introduce the activity. They had NO idea why I took their pictures earlier in the week so they were very surprised when we got to the part in the PowerPoint where their pictures started to come up. It was great to see and I would love to have video taped their reactions. The PowerPoint gave students prompts for their writing. Where will they live? What job will they retire from? How many kids will they have? What will life be like?

It was fun reading the responses. There were comments like: I will retire from working at McDonalds, I will have no kids or a wife…Life will be good!, and my favourite… I will retire from being a teacher 🙂

A couple days before this I read my students the book 100th Day Worries. The girl in the story is worried about not finding 100 things to bring to school on 100s day. It is a cute story showing how she solves the problem in a creative way. After the story was read I gave my kiddos a Ziploc bag for them to fill with 100 items and return to be displayed. Not everyone returned a baggie but that was okay by me. 14 of my 19 students brought a bag in and only 2 were the same.