Dot Day Sculptures

Thanks to the alignment of our calendar and curriculum map this year, we're celebrating DOT DAY at the end of our "Colors All Around" unit.  We've learned about primary colors, secondary colors and shades, and have been identifying shapes and types of lines.  Searching for a dimensional art project that would be a great summary to the unit AND a link to Peter H. Reynold's beloved book, I stumbled across this video from Cassie Stephens, a wonderful art teacher:

... and EUREKA!  Give the pieces of paper FEET!  Wanting to see, hear and read more, I discovered Cassie's blog here, and wouldn't you know it, she has lots of beautiful projects for Dot Day that she's shared! 

Inspired by her paper line sculptures, I decided to adapt Cassie's project to include ONLY the primary, secondary and shade colors that we've learned about and used in our unit.  As it was the first time I was introducing sculpture and dimension into a class project, I decided to prep materials in advance, so that my students could spend most of their time experimenting with folding and gluing. I used 9 inch square white construction paper for the background, and about an 8 inch diameter black paper circle for our main "dot."

A school die cut circle block created the medium size circles in red, yellow and blue, but I also added some smaller yellow circles (after an unfortunate yet not terribly surprising spill accident) created with a paper punch.  The line pieces were our secondary colors, orange, green and purple, cut into 1 inch by 12 inch strips.

After rereading The Dot, reviewing our colors and color vocabulary, I modeled how to first add our primary colored dots to the black one, making sure to remind my Stars to glide their glue near-ish (see what I did there, Peter H. Reynold's fans?) to the edge so that none of the dots would curl up and away from the background.  Then the creation of "feet" began, and the Stars were ~entranced~ by the folding of their secondary colored lines.  When they saw the first strip of paper raised above the dot yet still attached to it, they were HOOKED.

The only other instruction I gave my students was to keep the primary and secondary colored pieces of their sculpture within/inside the black dot.  They loved this activity, and I suspect that I'm going to see a lot more dimension and height in their crafty creations for the remainder of the year!  

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Psst!  Today's the last day to get 20% off of all of my Teachers Pay Teachers ELA and Math resources!

New in My TPT Store: Color Sight Word Recognition Pack

Here's a fun pack to help your homeschool, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (intervention) students develop their sight word recognition skills!

Short, sweet, and to the point, 1/4 pages are perfect for interactive journals, fine motor warm up activities, sight word reinforcement, and review or intervention tasks. I print out and cut each page into quarters, giving students the name of the crayon that we're using for the day, which provides them with print recognition, recall, and fine motor practice as we explore primary and secondary colors through literacy themes and art.

Red, yellow, blue, green, purple, orange, black, white, gray, brown and pink are included.

Students read the color word, color the crayon the correct shade, and then find three color word matches to cut out and glue below the crayon. Each quarter page can be glued into a journal, with the "wrong" color word on each page glued in separately (or thrown away).

Thanks for checking out this fun pack! Make sure to browse through my store for other pre-k, homeschool, kindergarten, and primary appropriate items.

Colors All Around

My Stars loved the purple crayon craft I shared in my last post, so much so in fact, that they thought our Pete the Cat plushie would like to be surrounded by crayons, as we continue to learn our color words.

Pete was a bonus point gift from Scholastic a few years ago, and the sweet wreath was made and given by a former Super Star student and her family.  My kindergartners love to greet Pete each morning!

Our second literacy theme is "Colors All Around:"

I've added the Trace and Cut Color Labels (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, black, pink, gray, and brown) to my TPT store.  Go check them out!

Green Wilma

The Stars were asked to retell Green Wilma, and worked together to dictate sentences for a summary to accompany our art project:

Green Wilma had a dream.

In her dream, she was a little

girl who woke up green.

She hopped after flies.

She hopped everywhere.

In her dream, she caught a

fly near a pond.

She woke up splashing in

the water.

She was a sleeping frog on a log,

not a green girl who ate flies!

You'll need:

9 X 12 construction paper

circle drawn at the bottom of the page

green watercolor

black, red (hair bow) and yellow crayons

red 1 X 9 strip (curled)

white paper for eyes