Skip to main content

Painting: Apple Tree

Today we painted! Jake loves paint but loves using the paintbrush more than finger painting. I had Jake make an apple tree using his hand, arm and thumb. We started by painting his hand and arm brown to represent the tree trunk.
Next, I showed him how to stipple the paint brush to make leaves on the tree. This did not come naturally to him but he picked it up!
I blew on the picture and tried to let it dry a few minutes while getting the next step ready. We used thumb prints to make apples in the tree. I showed him what to do and he quickly took over. It was interesting to me  to find that Jake did not know what his thumb was when I told him to make a thumb print. Some times we get caught up in everything they do know that it slips our mind on what we need to work towards! I sing the Thumbkin song all the time and thought he knew but I guess we will work on our body parts some more!
Here is our finished apple tree! Pretty cute, huh? He wanted to add apples falling out of the tree as well. A very sweet addition. I wrote Apple Tree on the top of the picture and we hung it on the refrigerator. This way we will see it all day long and can talk about apples, trees and farming.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

December Project-Based Learning: Sharing Through the Season

Every classroom teacher knows how crazy the classroom can be from Halloween to winter break. There are fun community activities, holidays, and a lot of excitement! I learned instead of trying to fight against the hype, to channel the excitement into projects!    This time of year the necessary elementary classroom routines become dull and have a harder time keeping student interest. So what better time to introduce project-based learning! I feel strongly about learning about the culture and traditions of others. In my classroom, over the years I have learned traditions celebrated in holidays I was familiar with and traditions from holidays I was not aware of previously.  This project was created to provide a way for students to share their personal family traditions during this exciting time being all-inclusive and without making religious statements.  Project Objective: The students will each select and read a picture book to the class asking questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Play to Write- Week 3

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name.  We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts.  He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...
2 comments
Read more

Name Writing Practice

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter.  As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...
1 comment
Read more