Le Soleil des Grenouilles est la lune. A frog's sun is the moon.

I love doing this project, the kids are so adept at directed drawing by this point and they really enjoy the subject as well. The 3-D tongues are an added bonus! I know I've borrowed this lesson from somewhere, so appologies for not crediting the right person.
For this project, we start, as I said, with a directed line drawing of a frog. Then we add the moon and the lily pad.
The kids get to paint their frogs and background, then when the paint is dry we add the rolled paper tongues, googly-eyes and some sparkle-y stars.

This year, I decided to make colour stations with the paint, as the colours were restricted. The desks are normally in little groups so on each "pod" I put a colour, (eg: blue) and some paint-brushes. All of the chairs were stacked and the kids had their drawings in hand. The RULE was that the paint-brushes STAY with the paint. While I had a few kids standing around waiting, or not sure where to go, for the most part, everyone got on with it, and I think there was only one accident where someone bumped into another person and their painting landed face down on the floor! I will FOR SURE do this again, as I found that there was less wasted paint and the kids got to move around and interact with more peers, not just those who they sit beside the whole rest of the day. It's also especially nice for the kids who sit beside those who have trouble sharing!

They all have such great personalities!

Two EASY Butterfly Projects

This first one is SO simple! It was a total "duh" moment!
I had seen some butterfly templates in a teacher book that I think were supposed to be made into finger puppets and had photocopied them for my butterfly file. Fast forward to our town's Easter Eggstravaganza and one of the crafts to make was a mobile using different coloured transparencies (pre-cut to be butterfly shaped, hole-punched top and bottom). The kids decorated them with stickers and moms and dads helped assemble them using paper clips, unfolded to be s-shaped. The kids could then add ribbons and beads to embellish their mobile.
Somehow mother's day snuck up on me and I realised that I needed a fast project to do with a challenging class, this was perfect!
At recess I photocopied the templates onto transparencies and then the kids really got into using the coloured sharpies to pretty them up!

The immersion class also wrote on the band part of the template the words: Je t'aime/maman/avec/l'amour/{nom} or Bonne/fete/des/mamans!/de {nom}
Then during an assembly (sh!) I opened up all of the paperclips and afterwards the kids assembled them, following my sample (one on the top, leading to two, each leading to one). Then, like at the craft table, they got to pretty-it-up some more with ribbon and beads.


The second butterfly project is a simple homage to Eric Carle.

Thanks mom for doing my bulletin board!!! I think your talents are being wasted as a professor in Engineering!
The children made their own painted paper using pretty much every colour of paint I had and then using different textured scrapers to move the paint, creating further detail. After the paint dried, the kids used different wing templates to come up with a butterfly they liked. (This was harder than I thought, many kids remembered the trick of cutting two, or four at a time, but then were disappointed when the painted side was down on half of their butterfly!
They were asked to embellish their butterfly by make stripes or spots or some kind of design using more paper, trading with their neighbours to find the perfect colour or pattern that they wanted to add.

Textured Bunny

I've been collecting bits of textured STUFF for a while now, waiting for a project to use it all. When I saw the "how to draw a bunny" post from {someone who I follow} I thought it would be the perfect time!
As you can see below, we used bubble wrap, corrugated cardboard and textured wall-paper for this project; as well as 2 pieces of white cardstock, water-colour (puck) paints, wax crayons and black sharpies.

We did this in two stages. We started by doing a directed drawing of the bunny, as shown here:

Next we took a second piece of paper and we used wax crayon to make the clouds and do rubbings for the grass (corrugated cardboard) and the basket (the wall-paper).

Then we painted the bunny (they could choose from yellow, white, brown or pink - or a combo!), and also painted the sky blue.
The next day when everything was dry, we cut out our bunnies and glued them to the backdrop. Hippity-hop!