march into green art

Simple paper sculptures are a perfect introduction to 3D art for Kindergarters and first grade students. I have done these in a variety of colors, but during March when students are learning about leprechauns, I have them use only green paper.

With these green "Leprechaun Playgrounds" I encourage students to create as many three-dimensional elements as possible. Of course I demonstrate twisting and folding techniques, but it's amazing what they can come up with on their own.

Prep is easy; simply cut tons of paper strips from the 9" end of 9x12 construction paper, roughly an inch wide. No measuring is necessary so don't worry about the width. In fact, variation in widths of the paper is even better. In fact, if students are fairly practiced with scissors, it's even better to have them cut their own strips.

I like to also provide a few 4x4 inch squares on each table for kids to make cylinders, or to cut out shapes to use along with spirals, accordion fold, circles, or whatever else they might come up with. Some students may decide to make paper chain loops that hang loose. Once I even had two little girls attach several strips to end to end, creating long, long tails that hung down to the floor.

This simple art lesson that delivers a lot of learning for little ones: lots of scissor practice, lots of use of those fine motor skills, lots of experimenting with paper folding, and lots of just plain fun... all in the context of an authentic art lesson that introduces children to sculpture as an art form! 

Check out this lesson .... and two more 'green art' lessons for St. Patrick's Day, here in my TeachersPayTeachers store! Enjoy!

haiku for all seasons

Second Grade Work

Haiku is one of my personal favorite poetry genres, rich with images, spare of words. Teaching children to write Haiku is not difficult, and it gives them a little practice with syllabication. It's a great supplement with units on seasons, animals, habitats, or other science topics!

For this lesson, the Haiku writing is only the first part; to me, they are incomplete until illustrated. I have done this lesson with second graders, at-risk students, English language learners of all elementary grades, and with fourth and fifth graders. The basic format of the lesson is identical for each of these groups; differentiations are made for specific needs. For example, a little more work on syllabication with second graders and English-language learners, and a push for more rich and detailed vocabulary with older students.

Second Grade Work

It's important to help students understand that Haiku does not tell a story, but simply presents an image for the reader to visualize. And I always tell students that it's more important to get a clear, beautiful image than to have the exact syllabication, so a little fudging is allowed. 

I always do a shared writing activity first, writing a Haiku with students. I model making a word bank, trying out different words, testing the syllables, and trying substitute words if the syllabication is not correct. But that 5-7-5 pattern can be tricky, especially for little ones, so I do make sure they know it's ok to leave a syllable out or add an extra, if they can't make their image work with the words they want to use.

Fourth Grade Work

Children can write a Haiku pretty quickly if they have an abundant word bank, so I do like to have them try two or three and then choose their favorite for publishing with illustration. Most often, I have students do a torn paper collage for the illustration, but cut paper collage, drawings, and even just a colorful tissue paper collage are just as beautiful.

Illustrated Haiku is a wonderful way to integrate Art with Language Arts, and it also can easily connect to Science as well. Any nature-oriented subject matter is appropriate, and the results make a beautiful, colorful, and maybe even informative bulletin board display.

This lesson, Illustrated Haiku for All Seasons, is available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store for those who would like step-by-step directions.
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what can you do with an old map?

Like a lot of people, I scout around on Pinterest for ideas. When I find an art activity that looks interesting, I post it to my own "Art Things To Try" Pinterest board. So the other day when I was getting ready to substitute in a friend's second grade classroom, I went looking on that board for something new to do. I landed on two different ideas that intrigued me. One was using bleeding tissue paper with just water to create colored paper; the other was creating a cityscape collage using the classified pages from a newspaper. Jumping off those two ideas, I came up with this cityscape idea.

To create the colorful background, the students used bleeding tissue paper, applied to wet paper. I happened to have an overabundance of blue and pink tissue paper, so I encouraged them to mix the blues and add a little pink to suggest a morning or evening sky. They just needed to brush on a little water, apply a torn piece of tissue paper, and continue applying sections of tissue until about half the paper was covered. We let it sit for about a half hour, then peeled off the tissue paper.

Since I had recently discovered about thirty old maps in my filing cabinet, we used those for the buildings. I cut up several, handed them out, and showed the students how to draw rectangles in between the folds with black marker or crayon, draw windows, and then cut them out. I suggested that they make eight or nine buildings of different sizes, and encouraged them to draw some interesting rooflines. I demonstrated putting the taller ones in the back with a little space between them, and then the shorter ones in front, to create a feeling of depth.

I love the colors of the buildings drawn on maps, and it was interesting to watch kids actually choose sections of maps to use. One student even flipped her map over and drew a building on the list of cities. The skies are particularly beautiful. We had talked about leaving white space to represent clouds, and many did, but the best part of this was that no glue was involved at all... just water! The colors are brilliant and the blending is actually more interesting than with a tissue paper (with glue) collage because the water helped bleed the tissue color more fluidly than glue.

This lesson will definitely go into my file for future use... and I still have a ton of maps!

The full lesson, available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, has easy, step-by-step directions and includes an art reflection worksheet for students, designed to help them think about their own art work and their creating process. Enjoy!

harvest moon and spooky trees

Sometimes I get inspiration for art lessons from random pictures, and that's how this one happened. One day my Facebook feed presented a photo of a tree silhouetted against a huge moon and this art lesson immediately formed itself in my mind:  tissue paper collage moon + spooky tree. I could see the end result in my brain, and backtracked through that image to develop the lesson for a second grade classroom.

At first, I thought it would be a fine idea to have the students create the circle using a compass, but no compasses were to be found so I opted for a hand-drawn circle, which turned out to be a huge benefit!  The circle was filled with tissue paper collage, and while that dried, we made the trees -- basically a line drawing outlined with another continuous line, cut on the outside line, and flipped over.

My suggestions to the kids:
Don't put the moon in the exact center of the page.
Don't put the tree in the exact center of the moon.

Some of the kids had a little trouble cutting out the tree shape, especially if they had crossed branches, so I helped by showing them how to cut into a closed shape. For a "first time" try, I think these turned out great! I wrote up the lesson and had a few other teachers try it out, and it was a hit with everyone!

It's a great art lesson for teaching how to use space, talking about the use of warm and cool colors, and working with interesting lines. It was fun, easy, a little messy, and generally pretty successful. And it's perfect for October! Just spooky enough to be "Halloween-y" without all the Halloween hype. This lesson, with step-by-step directions, is available in my TeachersPayTeachers store. Look for Harvest Moon Tree Silhouette!

art goes back to school

In the back-to-school preparation frenzy, art education is the last thing on many, if not most, teachers' minds. And yet, what could be more fun... and even relaxing... than a little art during the first week of school? Best of all, teachers can find out a lot about students' fine motor and other skills, as well as their work habits and level of responsibility and concentration. 

One of my favorite things to do as an art teacher was to start the year with a little multimedia exploration. I set it up like Kindergarten stations, with four different media on four different tables for 1st and 2nd graders, and 3 different media on 3 tables for Kindergarten. Students started in one place and took their papers with them to the next station and added to their design. Kindergarten students used the same paper for the whole exploration, while 1st and ends used two sheets of paper, mixing two media on each paper.

First and Second stations included all of these, and Kindergarten stations were the same, minus the paint:

• tempera paint with brushes and straws for blowing
• crayons
• colored pencils with shapes to trace
• construction paper, scissors, and glue

It took a little extra thinking to decide in which order to arrange the stations for rotation, because each group of students started with a different media, and I wondered how feasible it was going to be for those who started at the paint table. In the end, I decided to just not worry about it and see what happened. Before starting the activity, I quickly introduced the materials at each station and explained the procedure, including making a point of explaining to students that they would keep the same paper when they moved to a new station. Other than that, I didn't really give any earth-shattering directions, because I really did want this to be an exploration.

An interesting side benefit of this activity on our first meeting day was that it gave me an instant overview evaluation of important skills: use of scissors, glue, and brushes; painting technique development; pencil and crayon grip; and fine motor and eye-hand coordination skills. It even revealed what kind of sense students had in putting together a composition, including whether or not they thought about what they were doing. It was especially interesting to see some students just start cutting shapes and gluing them on the paper at random, while others would spend time arranging their shapes just so while gluing, or giving slow, thoughtful attention to how and where they applied paint to paper, or how they lined up shapes for tracing.

Some students were obviously organized and/or methodical, and some students were obviously less so:

For those teachers and administrators who think art is just an extra for random Friday afternoons before vacations, I propose that there is much to be learned, by students and teachers, when children make art. Teachers can learn much about individual students' fine-motor skills, spatial sense, responsibility, and more, and students can learn how to develop concentration, practice motor skills, and more.... not the least being able to express themselves and create a little beauty for this world.

So.... how about starting the school year with a little mixed-media exploration? My store at TeachersPayTeachers has lots of art lessons for teachers who don't have art background. This mixed media exploration is included in the bundle Start With Art, and you'll find a couple of free art lessons, too! Check it out!
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start with art

I don't normally use this blog for direct marketing, but since TeachersPayTeachers is having a site-wide Back to School sale (Aug 4 & 5), and since I have a store there, I thought I'd take the opportunity to blatantly peddle my Start With Art lesson bundle designed for elementary classroom teachers who are not necessarily art teachers.

This collection of five art lessons is a great way to start the school year with lower grade elementary students. It introduces the elements of design -- line, shape, color, pattern & texture, and space -- with open-ended explorations designed to allow students to use a variety of art materials and techniques. And... it gives teachers a great opportunity to observe students motor skills, work habits, creativity, and responsibility!

Start With Art is a big seller in my TpT store, and it's 20% off for two days -- August 4 and 5. With the TpT promotion code (BTS14) you save an additional 10%, for a total savings of 28%!

Check out my store, and while you're there, download my free resource, Making Time For Art. It's filled with ideas and suggestions for incorporating more art lessons into the classroom. Enjoy!

learning to cut

Third day of school.
Kindergarten.
Choose a color.
Cut into strips.
Glue onto black paper.

I can't begin to count the number of second and third grade students I've seen in the past few years who could not efficiently use a pair of scissors. So when working as a support helper for the first three days of school in Kindergarten, I manned a center where the kids only needed to cut. Not on lines, not on shapes, just cut.  I showed them how to use the scissors -- thumb in the small hole, fingers in the big hole -- and how to hold the paper -- vertically, with the scissors pointing to the sky -- and asked them to cut their paper into strips.

Each student was able to choose a color, and in a group of six, everyone had a different color (there were about nine bright colors to choose from) so nobody's strips got mixed up on the table. Everyone also got a sheet of black paper to glue their strips on, and to make things easy, I brushed watered-down white glue all over the black paper and they just needed to lay their cuttings down onto the wet glue. This job was all about cutting and nothing else.

I always encourage / teach kids to hold their paper vertically, cut pointing to the sky, and to turn the paper instead of the scissors. This helps them be able to see exactly what they are cutting, because the paper and scissors are at eye level. This is particularly important if they are cutting on a line, or cutting out a shape, but for this activity, there were no lines to follow at all, so each child was able to just cut their strips the best they could. I gave no directions on how to glue them on the paper, and it was interesting to see how the children had different methods for gluing, some being very meticulous and orderly, others gluing the strips in a more haphazard manner.

When they were all finished, we had a beautiful assortment of line art, all ready to go on the wall. Even though each child had the same directions, no two of these were alike. I think they made a perfect first art activity!

about art materials

When I taught art in Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades for two years, I had the luxury of a generous budget and was able to buy all the art materials I needed for a basic art curriculum. I didn't wander off into anything fancy; I stuck to the basics and the process of creative art-making. These days, I am retired and subbing in other peoples' classrooms, and I am intrigued (and sorry to say, not in a very good way) about the lack of quality art materials out there for kids to use. When it comes to buying art materials, my philosophy is to always buy the best quality possible. The cost may be initially higher, but the returns are greater: they generally last longer, work better, and produce much better results. I stick pretty much to the basics and stay away from most "specialty" items like glittery watercolor or tapping glue bottles. I follow this philosophy both for classroom art materials and for my own art-making process, because I want kids to feel like artists when they are making art, not to struggle with the materials they are using.

What do I consider basic? And are some brands better than others? Does it really matter what brand you buy?  You bet!  My favorites...

CRAYONS.   Good quality crayons have better color, probably due to the ratio of pigment to wax (I'm not a crayon scientist, so I'm guessing here). Poor quality crayons have more wax and the colors are not as bright, no matter how hard you press. I won't buy anything but Crayola. The reds are bright. The yellows are strong. Many teachers buy cheaper brands and my experience is that the colors are just very bland. And by the way, I want the colors to be named what they are. I came across some crayons in a friend's classroom that had color names like Blueberry Swirl or Grape Soda (I am making those up, but you get the gist), which are very cute and all, but were not even that accurate. Colors have names and don't need to be cutified. I like that Crayola names their blues Indigo, Blue, Cerulean. These are real names that artists use.

CONSTRUCTION PAPER CRAYONS are great to have on hand. They are made for drawing on dark colored construction paper. They have some kind of reflective material in them. Kids love using them! They are made by Crayola, and are wrapped with black paper so they are easily distinguished if they get mixed with regular crayons. For general storage, I like to keep crayons in zip baggies instead of in their boxes. It's easy for kids to find the color they need, and a whole class set will fit in one shoebox-sized plastic tub.

MARKERS:  I like Crayola markers for kids' use. They seem to last a pretty long time and the colors are pretty bright. I always store them with the tips facing down. This way, the ink is always saturating the tip and they stay nice and "juicy" instead of drying out. Laying them down in a tub works, also. For my own use, on charts and for art lessons where I do demonstrations, I use Mr. Sketch. The colors are very vibrant and the chisel point lets me make bolder lines so that the charts are easy to read. I like the smelly ones.

COLORED PENCILS:  Crayola again, although there are other brands that are pretty good, too. I like having a good supply of multiple, basic colors. I generally buy boxes of 12 colors and then dump them all in a plastic tub. They are great for still-life and other observation drawing.

GLUE STICKS:   I only buy UHU. It's firmer than cheaper glue sticks, doesn't clump or squish into a mess, and lasts a lot longer than any other brand I've used. I once put in an order for UHU glue sticks when I was teaching art, and the school secretary substituted a cheaper brand. I was working in three schools at the time, and guess at which school the glue sticks got used up first? These are definitely noticeably more expensive than other brands, but very well worth it in the long run. They have a "screw" top which I like. For some reason, kids seem to smoosh them less. Maybe because they are less smooshable.

WHITE GLUE:  Elmers.  The regular kind. Not the washable kind, the school glue kind, the clear gel kind (oh, that's the worst). Just the regular "Glue-All" kind. What I really really hate is those tapping bottles that drive me crazy when kids are doing collages. I think teachers buy them because they are tired of kids wasting glue, but it's not that hard to teach kids how to use small dots of glue. As for longevity, I always made sure to remind kids to close the stopper and wipe the glue off the tip, and then store the bottles standing up. It's that easy. The bottles will last practically forever.

SCISSORS:  I like "pointy" scissors, even for Kindergartners. They just seem to cut better. They seem more serious.  Fiskars makes a pretty nice pair of scissors for little hands, and they seem to work fine for either hand, so you don't need any special left-handed ones. 

PENCILS:  Dixon Ticonderoga. Nothing else will do. They are great for drawing. They have good, soft erasers. They sharpen well without breaking. They are worth the extra few cents per dozen. They last longer, write smoother, sharpen easier, and erase without smudging. I could write a whole blog post just about pencils. Another time. When the erasers go, as they will, I offer Pink Pearl erasers, not one for each student, but several stored near the pencil sharpener. (Which is a whole other post, but I swear by a good pencil sharpener.)

And last, but definitely not least .....  PAPER!  

I like good quality CONSTRUCTION PAPER, like Tru-Ray, because the paper is smoother and the colors are nice and bright. And by all means.... save all the scraps for collage-making!  It's a good idea to invest in some white DRAWING PAPER.  It comes in reams and is not too expensive. I like having both 9x12 and 12x18 on hand. It can be used when construction paper is not really needed but copy paper or newsprint is too thin. Regular, ordinary COPY PAPER is great for pencil drawing. It's nice and white, relatively inexpensive, and looks great on the wall in a gallery. Under no circumstances would I ever use any kind of newsprint for art lessons. Ever. Not even for sketching. It's just too ugly.

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FOR BEST RESULTS, TREAT STUDENTS LIKE ARTISTS

If you buy the best you can afford, or even go a little over your budget, it will pay in the long run. When the budget is limited (and when isn't it, but I mean seriously limited) and you're tempted to buy cheaper materials, consider buying less units and get higher quality instead. Maybe it's better to have 10 boxes of high quality crayons and have kids share, than to have 20 boxes of poor quality crayons with drab color. Maybe it's better for three students to share a good stick of UHU glue stick than to have each student have their own stick of gooey, messy substandard glue stick. Every student does not always need their own everything.

Treat students like artists, and maybe they will make great art!

Enjoy! Create!

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snowmen with personality

In a second grade class where my job was to teach art all morning, I read the book The Biggest, Best Snowman Ever. After a short discussion about the story, I told the students they were going to make a torn paper collage of a snowman so big that the only thing they'd be able to see was part of the face. Then I proceeded to have them show me some facial expressions.... happy.... sad.... angry.... surprised.... shocked.... thoughtful.... etc.... and I drew some quick expressions on the board, the way they might look on a snowman's face (with "coal" eyes and mouth).

I showed students how to tear out the side of a snowman's head out of white paper, leaving the corner intact, and then gluing it onto a blue paper so that the corners lined up. Then I asked them to create a snowman face with a "carrot" nose and "coal" for eyes and the mouth... and to be sure to show some kind of interesting facial expression on their snowman.

I suggested that they tear out all the parts first and arrange them how they like them before they glue anything down. Most of the students followed these directions. Not all, but most. The hardest part of this collage activity is the initial tearing of the head shape. I showed students how to measure a finger length from the top left corner of the paper, and a finger length from the bottom right corner of the paper, put dots at those points, then tear a head shape that begins and ends at those dots. Just a couple of students still had trouble getting a workable head shape; for those students, I drew a very faint pencil line for the head shape and had them tear on the line.

This is a simple activity, using only 9x12 construction paper and glue, that requires some fine motor coordination, some eye-hand coordination, a little patience, and a little creativity and imagination. As students worked, I wandered around and asked what facial expression they were creating on their snowman. For hats, I had students just look for any color construction paper from the scrap bin. One student chose the same blue as the background for the hat, so I had him switch that out so we could actually see the hat.

When the snowmen faces were done, we lined them up on the white board tray and looked at each one individually. They definitely did show a wide variety of facial expressions!

Before they began their snowman faces, I had students create different facial expressions and drew them on the white board to show how changing the size of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, and direction of the eyebrows could give the snowman some personality.  

P.S. This lesson is available in my TeachersPayTeachers store. :-)

patriotic colors collage

These "patriotic color" collages are fun and easy to do with Kindergarten through fourth grade students. The ones pictured here were done by a second grade class.

 If I have time, I begin the activity with a "looking at art" session where students tell what they notice in Alexander Calder's lithograph, Stars and Stripes Students are generally quick to notice that Calder used only red and blue, and that it reminds them of the American flag, or the 4th of July. They often notice that the piece has more red than blue, and that one of the stars has a dot in the middle of it.

The "looking at art" session is followed by the art activity itself, in which there are very few rules other than to be creative, use shapes and strips or stripes to create an interesting design, and to NOT make a flag. Some students have a hard time getting beyond the flag itself, but the addition of yellow stars helps. Each student gets a 9x12 white background, a 6x9 piece of red, and a 4x6 piece of blue, plus the yellow for the stars.

 As part of the lesson, I teach 2nd grade and older students how to make a "quirky star" by drawing a circle in the center of a yellow square, drawing five dots around the circle, then connecting the dots to the circle, in sequence (it's easier than it sounds). First graders just draw and cut out a yellow star, and Kindergartners get a pre=printed yellow star which they are asked to tear out. I never give the students pre-cut stars because I want the stars to be quirky, asymmetrical, and fanciful.

 This lesson is pretty much fool-proof; anything students come up with looks great!

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kindergarten line collages

Take a classroom of kindergartners, hand them some scissors and construction paper, and then some glue sticks. Show them how to cut strips. Pile all the strips in the middle of the table, and set them free. That's what I did in a kindergarten class last week at a school where I used to run an art program. The teacher told me, while reviewing the day, that if I wanted to do "an art thing" to feel free. So, with her permission I set aside what she had planned for my center and instead I had the students just cut strips from many different colors of construction paper.

 It's always interesting to watch kindergartners using scissors. In fact, it takes more than watching. Sometimes I have to rearrange the scissors in their hands so that the right fingers are in the right holes. And I like to teach kids to hold the paper upright and cut with the scissors pointing to the ceiling. I tell them this is how artists do it. Well, it's how I do it, and I'm an artist, so I guess that's ok.

After the cutting station and a recess break, everyone got a sheet of black construction paper and a glue stick. My directions to them were to use the strips to make a picture or a design, and to be creative. I showed them how to use a piece of scratch paper on which to lay the strips when applying the glue so the tables wouldn't get all sticky. Some worked in complete concentration, meticulously arranging the strips to create houses or other "name-able" objects. Others glued the lines/strips in random order, while still others clearly had something in mind, even if the result was clearly non-representational... at least to the casual observer.

 For sharing, each finished composition was held up for admiring. I had the students tell what they could see, or what it looked like. It was fun and interesting to hear how they interpreted each others' art work. This was SO easy and the kids got a whole lot of practice cutting and gluing, like Kindergartners should!
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torn paper face collages

This lesson focuses on shape, color, and space, and deals with proportion and facial features without the stress of attempting to create a realistic face. Because the shapes are torn, not cut or drawn, the lesson automatically lends itself to what I call "ish-ness" (named after Ish, the wonderful little book by Peter Reynolds). The "rules" for the activity are simple: start with two predominant colors, include all face parts, don't overlap the shapes, and use no scissors or pencils. After listing these on the board, I ask students what they think "predominant" means. If no one gets close, I define it for them as main, as in "two main colors" ... and stress that it doesn't mean that they can't use other colors as well. Just before they start, I ask them to think about whether they want their piece to be symmetrical or asymmetrical, reviewing the meaning of the terms.

Students use a 12x12 sheet of black construction paper for their background, and each table has an assortment of colored construction paper to choose from. As they work, I encourage creatively-used shapes for different facial features, and remind them of the ongoing collage rule of putting glue on the back of the colored pieces, not on the background. I also remind them to tear any straight edges that may have made their way to the piece. Generally with collage work, I don't even get the glue out until after students have torn several shapes and started arranging them on the background. I encourage them to get all their shapes defined first before gluing anything down.

After a walk-around, where students can take their time looking at everyone's art work, I go through the pieces one by one and we identify as a whole group what the two predominant colors are, and whether the piece is symmetrical or asymmetrical. I also point out how lines have been created between the applied shapes, in the negative space.
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what if?

What if I just put out a bunch of art materials and don't do a lesson? What if I ask students to think about other art they've done? What if I tell them to do something similar to something they've already done, but to change it somehow or, if they want, to just explore?

One student might draw herself in a garden, surrounded by a rainbow, under a rainy-sunny-starry sky:



Another student might explore lines with watercolor and crayon:



Somebody might do a bird collage:



Somebody else might do a three-dimensional line collage:



Somebody might do a shape rubbing:



Somebody else might draw or trace a series of rectangles and fill them with colorful patterns:



And somebody else might make a collage of the sun:

sunflakes

Frank Asch has a wonderful poem called Sunflakes that's the inspiration for this second grade activity that incorporates radial symmetry. I introduce the art activity by showing photographs of snowflakes from the book The Art of the Snowflake by Kenneth Libbrecht, giving students time to look carefully at the shapes and negative space, and pointing out how the shapes repeat on each ray of the snowflake. This introduces the concept of radial symmetry. We then do a shared read-aloud of the charted poem, and talk about what a sunflake might look like.

To make the sunflakes, students first cut three skinny lines from a 9x12 sheet of construction paper which are overlapped and glued onto white paper, arranged to create six equally-spaced radial lines.... not as easy as it sounds! They then cut and glue a variety of shapes onto and between the lines to build up a "sunflake" shape. Emphasis is on radial symmetry and color. Only red, yellow, and orange construction paper is used for the sunflakes, so a lesson in warm colors can also be thrown in. These sunflakes reinforce cutting skills and geometric shapes. Another possibility is to have them paint sunflakes, which could incorporate color mixing.

The discussion at the end of the lesson focuses on a review of the concept of radial symmetry. A wall display includes the poem and an assortment of sunflakes.

harold and the purple crayon, revisited

Last year, I had my Kindergarten students draw "purple pictures" after reading aloud Harold and the Purple Crayon. It was fun, but this year I decided to focus more on imagination and have the students do purple collages. I started by asking students if anyone knew what it meant to use your imagination. A few students had ideas like having an imaginary friend, or pretending. I then asked a second question: If I asked you to use your imagination, what part of your body would you use? Most students pointed to their heads, which told me that they knew what it meant to use their imaginations although most were unable to articulate what it meant. So far so good. After this little introduction, I read the story aloud, letting the students make comments about Harold's use of his imagination on his little purple excursion.

After the story, I explained to students that they were going to use their imaginations to create purple collages. I demonstrated cutting long strips from a 6x9 piece of purple construction paper, which I placed onto a piece of drawing paper taped to the white board. (The students were intrigued by the fact that my pieces of paper were sticking to this paper, so I explained that I had made it sticky with some spray glue.) I showed students that there were cardboard squares, rectangles, triangles, and circles out on the tables, and modeled tracing a circle on the corner of the purple paper. I put all the cut pieces on the sticky paper and proceeded to move them around, letting students comment on what they thought my pictures looked like.

Students were able to choose either regular purple or magenta for their collages, and white or black paper for the background. I asked them to cut some long skinny purple lines first, then to trace and cut some purple shapes. I encouraged them to place all their pieces on the background and move them around to see what they could make before doing any gluing. As students finished their collages, I had them get white drawing paper and a purple crayon and asked them to draw the pictures they had just made.



For discussion and sharing, I held up the collages one at a time and had each student tell, in a complete sentence, what he or she had made. This gave me the opportunity to introduce the word "design" for those who had not attempted to create a picture of an object. Some students had very simple responses, like "I made a house," or "I made a bird," while others included many details in their sentences: "I made a person in a sleeping bag, camping." Whether their collages showed objects they could name or designs with no subject matter, I congratulated them for using their imaginations... just like Harold.
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