Beautiful Faces and Literacy Night

Last week I posted about exploring different shades of color to paint our faces and using mirrors to help us draw our features as close to "real life" as possible.  Here are the finished products!

 

I love these cute little faces!  They did such a great job trying to draw themselves just how they look!

Last week we had a literacy night at school called The Magic of Books!  It was so much fun!

Students were spilt into different groups and rotated through different literacy activities.  They made books, listened to stories and even got to sing and dance to one of our favorite children's books!

The night started with a magician!  It was standing room only!

Here is a video of one group singing to The Very Hungry Caterpillar!

The kids got in on the preparation for the night by making scenes from The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle in art class!  I was blown away by their work!

   

Didn't they do a great job?!?

Eric Carle is on of my favorite authors and illustrators.  We will be talking about him and learning about how he does his art later in he year!

This is a great book to use to practice sequencing and retelling!  These are both skills that the children will need to be able to do before first grade!





We will have another "fun night" at school in the winter!  The next one will focus on math... and there are some super fun plans in the works for that one, too!  You won't want to miss it!

Shades of Kindergarten

Last week we continued our color exploration by doing some fun activities!

We experimented with mixing colors again!  But this time we used ICING instead of paint!  Icing tastes MUCH better!

We started with three scoops of white icing and used food coloring to make them red, blue and yellow. Then we mixed the colors together to create our own color wheel made of icing!

The best part was eating the finished product!  YUM!!

We worked together to spell the color words to make color math problems!  We are going to put these in the hall with our color wheels so we can share what we have learned with our fellow students!

(At the bottom of this picture is the word "honesty".  This is the first of (some) of the 40 developmental assets that we will be learning about this year!  More on that later...)

We also are working together to make a rainbow!  We are including different shades of the colors.  We are not finished yet but we are working on it!

Our color unit also included a discussion about shades of skin color!  During our name game, we talk a lot about drawing each person correctly.  That means using the right color shade for skin as well as hair, eyes, and more.  I've been VERY impressed with the improvement that the students have shown in their illustrations!  I love the details they are using in their pictures!  This will serve us well when we start Writer's Workshop next week!

 Table 4 working on the Name Game!

We started by mixing different colors together to make shades of skin color.  We talked about what color we need more of to make a specific shade darker or lighter.  Then we painted our blank faces!

Next we read the book, Two Eyes, A Nose and A Mouth.  We really focused on the way faces are really shaped.  We talked about how to draw eyes and noses and mouths.  We also talked about the correct colors to use.  No one has a purple nose!

Finally, we used little mirrors to look at our faces and then we drew what we saw on the faces we had painted.  

 

 

Our finished faces will on display on our classroom door!  I will post a picture of that as soon as we get it finished!  

It's been a busy few weeks working on our color exploration!  We have leaned a LOT about color!  We continue to work on spelling our color words!  You can find our color word songs on Youtube by searching Kindergarten Color Word Songs.  Your child can tell you which songs are the ones we sing!  

Stay tuned for updates on our math stations, literacy stations, fall exploration and the 40 developmental assets!