Gingerbreads Back in Action

A few years ago I partnered up with one of my favorite Kindergarten teachers, Amanda Libby, to create an integrated arts ELA lessons!  You can follow Amanda on twitter @mrslibbyFM and learn all about the incredible things she does with her students!  You can learn more about Arts Integration from the Kennedy Center. 

Back up to 2 years ago and Amanda and I realized that we were both teaching similar topics: The Gingerbread Man.  Every December the kindergarten compares and contrasts different versions of fairy tales, including the Gingerbread Man.  Around this time I also do a gingerbread lesson with my kindergarten classes.  

This is a great lesson to teach students about outline and self-control! Student start out by tracing a gingerbread shape and then using a thin paint brush to create an outline around their shape.  They also can add in details using this thin outline technique.  

On day two, they add color, cut, and attach to a background paper.  They always come out looking bright, colorful, and adorable.  

This is when we brought the two different content areas, Art and ELA, 
together creating an arts integration lesson!  In fact this joint lesson has been so successful in Amanda's class that this year we did it with the whole grade!

In additional to bringing knowledge of different versions of the Gingerbread Man into the art room, kindergarten teachers also used this as an opportunity to teach students about verbs, action words.  Each student is assigned a verb.   Using the iPad app Puppet Pals, we helped students learn and illustrate their knowledge of verbs in a fun and creative way. 

I love showing students that they can "Connect to Tech", or bring their physical art into the digital world. In puppets pals students are able to upload their artwork into the app and can move their gingerbread across a background to show their verb's action.  The end result is wonderful and the students loved seeing how their artwork can be used in a new format.

Take a look at their finished works!

Mrs. Halligan's Class

Mrs. Libby's Class

Mrs. Murphy's Class

Mrs. Newton's Class

Mrs. Ochoa's Class

Monsters Have Feelings Too!

This year I have been working to bring more SEL (Social Emotional Learning) into my art room.  Students have been using art to identify feelings and I hope on some level process what those feelings mean to them.  This year Fuller Meadow artists have already given feelings to acorns and dots too! 

Perhaps my favorite feelings lesson this year is Kindergarten's Monsters Have Feelings Too! 

I love doing monster collages in the fall.  We are able to touch on so many important fine motor skills; folding, cutting, drawing shapes, and more! The kinder monsters always come out adorable and are great for a not so "Halloweeny" Halloween display.

This year, we took our monsters one step further and gave them feelings, 

because monsters have feelings too!

We read The Color Monster by Anna Llenas to help us identify emotions.  

As we read the book, I gave students a chance to show me (with their me too sign language) if they have had that feeling  that day. I loved seeing students thinking this through and showing me if they had that feeling too.  Many of them saying "me too" for almost every feeling!  

It is so important to acknowledge that all feelings are ok and 

that you can cycle through many different feelings in a day!

As these young kinder artists worked on their monster collages, we talked about how to change the shape of eyes, eyebrows, mouths, etc. to show different feelings.  

They had so much fun bringing their monsters to life.

Arts Integration

We integrated this lesson with their classroom ELA lessons and students 

wrote a sentence about their monster's feelings. Kinder writers used these sentence
blanks to work on identifying color and emotion words.

Connect to Tech

I love showing students how they can take a physical piece of art and "connect to tech"! We used Chatterpix to give voice to these kinder monsters and truly express their emotions.

Mrs. Halligan's Monsters

Mrs. Murphy's Monsters

Mrs. Newton's Monsters

Mrs. Ochoa's Monsters

How do you bring SEL into your classrooms, I'd love to hear!