Beautiful Borrowed Blogger Lessons

1st grade butterflies are complete and have received rave reviews! As I told you before, this lesson was from Art Project Girl here. We used crayons for some branches and clouds, and liquid watercolor made from dead markers to create the sky. We cut out and glued the butterflies on the skies, and added white spots on the wings (the kids, who are Monarch experts, told me we needed them!) with Q-tips and white tempera. All done!

And 3rd graders made these funky painted paper "Mexican guitars". They are studying Mexico in their classroom and I just loved this lesson I found here at the Painted Paper blog. The kids really attacked this project with enthusiasm, from making the large sheets of painted paper, to cutting and embellishing. We listened to mariachi music, and got into adding "bling" - buttons, sequins, foam, and yarn strings. Students used scraps of each others' painted paper for the bridge, neck, and circular opening.

I like that each guitar is different. I do NOT use templates when I teach, except occasionally for circles. To make the guitar shapes, we all practiced drawing ovals in the air. Then students drew a stack of two ovals on the back of their painted paper, connected them with a curve, and added a long neck. I think their guitars were pretty successful, without tracing someone else's guitar shapes, don't you?!