Les Bouleaux, Birch Trees - water colour

I was inspired by this post by Patty at Deep Space Sparkle (the blog that started my passion!) She starts her intro with "Everyone has done a birch tree art lesson. They are such a lovely tree, stripped of their leaves and shimmering with black and white bark." ummm... nope.. never done a Birch Tree lesson.... until now! Now Patty does a little more with her lesson.. like background and foreground trees and textured sky. But I think with grade 2s, we'll stick with the basics! This has been a rather time-consuming project, as I really wanted optimal results.. therefore, I drew the horizon line on each paper, and have been instructing each child individually on how to do the shading for the trees. This, coupled with the fact that I've been off sick for the past week, means that we're a little late in getting the first art project of the year finished! However, I think you'll see that the results are worth the wait.

Step 1: Masking-tape off the "birch trees"

Step 2: paint the sky (they could choose orange/yellow or blue/purple)
Step 3: Mme paints the horizon line
Step 4: Outline the birch trees with a black sharpie

Step 5: Mme helps each one paint their shadows
Step 6: Remove the tape and add some bark detail with a sharpie
Voila!

I'm now working on a Valentine's Day project that I'm SO excited about! I can't wait!!

Snowman Families - Les familles de neige

I love the idea of doing a family of snowmen that Gail did. While she used a series of different pre-cut foam circles to print her snowpeople, I didn't have any pre-cut circles that would work to stamp. Then I remembered a few posts on my blogroll from a few months ago about teachers who were having their students make their own stamps out of plastecine! Now THAT I had!

I showed the kids how to roll a ball with the plastecine and then press it down to create a circle on the bottom. By making their balls bigger and smaller, they could create a variety of sizes of circles for their families. Then I showed them how to make a snowflake stamp by making indentations with the side of their pencils or poking the pencil in the circle. All of these "stamps" were then dipped in white poster paint and printed on green or red construction paper.

Finally, this afternoon, we paired up with some big buddies to play on letterplaygound! Each kid made their last name to go with their snowman family.

Snow Flakes - Les Flocons de Neige

This was a project done on both large and small scales. I taped 2 12x18 sheets together to create the large for our Xmas concert backdrop (mounted on black) and then I also did the same project on a piece of 8.5x11 cardstock folded in half (hotdog fold), which when dry we cut in half to create 2 Xmas cards.
The method to the madness was the same for both!
We started by doing pastel snowflakes on white paper. I taught the kids a basic 6-sided snowflake, but was amazed at how they took off with their own interpretations and taught each other different designs. Oh, the kids were restricted to only COOL colours of pastels (which was a good refresher lesson in itself.)
They then took blue water-colour pucks, loaded their brush with water and did a wash over their flakes. I like how the colour really varies across the paper with the large projects. Finally we GLITTERED and GLAMMED them up so they would shine under the show lights. Voilà!