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Category Archives: 1st grade

Matching Mittens Art Project with Free Templates

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Matching mittens adorned with abstract patterns, hearts, and stars pop against a blue background, accented by three delicate white snowflakes—an ideal art project waiting for your creative touch.

Matching Mittens Art Project This is a fun winter art project that allows students to use their creativity to make matching mittens, exploring symmetry and balance! I have been doing this art project for years and years and I keep returning to it every year because I think it’s great for fine motor skills and spatial awareness. It also strengthens their attention to detail as they work to make both mittens match perfectly. I’m not sure where I originally learned … Read more… →

Easy Paper Weaving Tutorial with Free Template

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Colorful patchwork art with pink, purple, and red squares decorated with hearts, stars, and spirals. Features vibrant feathers along the edges, resembling a paper weaving masterpiece.

Are you looking for an easy way to do paper weaving with kids? Are you not wanting to cut all those mats for your students? In this tutorial, I will show you how to make a paper weaving the easy way – with a FREE template included. I thought I had posted about this template and technique but realized I never did. In a Facebook art teacher group, another member asked for a source to buy paper looms, which gave … Read more… →

Lunar New Year Art Projects and Book | Chinese New Year

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Cover of "I Love Lunar New Year" by Eva Wong Nava and Xin Li. Features a child holding a dragon decoration against a festive red and gold background with lanterns.

Hello! Are you looking for some fun art projects to do during January? The Lunar New Year is coming up Wednesday, January 29, 2025 this year. I have a few fun art projects planned for some of my classes and I wanted to share with you these great ideas! First, I’m going to read some of the classes this book: I Love Lunar New Year (Amazon Affiliate links used at no extra cost to you. Money earned goes towards maintaining … Read more… →

Free Viking Ship Templates | Art Project

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Four colorful Viking ship artworks with decorative sails on a blue and white background; text reads "Viking Ship Artwork, free templates for your next art project!

My first grade students had a blast making these Viking ship pictures. They have been studying about the Vikings in their Language Arts & Social Studies class, so it was a fun cross-curricular project. (See more images of Viking ships here.) I have provided free templates for you to use! You can find them for free at my shop here. Here’s how you use them: I hope you enjoy this project as much as my students did! It was a … Read more… →

Free Art Sub Plan: Primary Color Hands

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The "Primary Color Hands" art lesson for grades K-2 offers a creative activity ideal as a free art sub plan. Goals include using primary colors to create unique patterns and enhance tracing skills. Students trace their hands and design vivid patterns, resulting in colorful hand designs.

This is an art project perfect for a kindergarten to 2nd grade substitute lesson plan. When you have to take a sick day, you never know if your sub is going to have an art background or not. This is a simple, one page art handout with goals, steps and an example. In order to print out the full, high resolution handouts, visit my TPT shop for the FREE download! This was a lesson idea a former colleague shared with … Read more… →

What To Do On the First Day of Art Class

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Colorful watercolor frame with a paintbrush and palette surrounding the text "First Day of Art Class, Projects & Books.

Hello! I am already seeing lots of posts in Facebook groups asking what to do in the first few days of art class. In this post, I will walk you through what I plan to do this year in my classes. This is very similar to what I have done in other years. First, I start all classes with basic introductions and talking about the room and art class. We go over the rules and expectations. I use a video … Read more… →

Inside Out Design

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Abstract artwork featuring symmetrical yellow and black geometric shapes, with yellow shapes forming face-like profiles facing each other on a black background—an Inside Out Design masterpiece.

This is a fun, one-day project for kids that teaches about positive and negative space and is good for spatial awareness. I taught this to my 1st graders and most of them understood the concepts and some of them needed help. First, positive space is the shape you cut out of the paper. Negative space is the shape left behind. You will need one sheet of background paper 8.5″ x 11″ and a color rectangle of paper that is half … Read more… →

Grid Name Design for Back to School

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A colorful drawing composed of repeated text spelling "MARCIA" in various alternating colors and patterns within a grid layout on white paper, creating an eye-catching grid name design perfect for back to school.

Are you looking for an easy back to school project for your students? Here is a name design that I have taught in the past. This will be easy for you to do, with very little prep. My own kiddo did this project in their 2nd grade class and that is where I got the idea. It is so simple yet makes cool results. All you need to do is print out the grid paper and maybe make an example … Read more… →

Winter Landscape Art Project for Kids

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Winter Landscape Art Project for Kids

Here is a fun and seasonal art project for kids that can teach about the element of space. I did this project with my 1st graders. The first step is to paint stripes of green on a large piece of paper. We used watercolor paints. Wait for the paint to dry. Cut a piece of white paper down the middle to make hills of snow. Glue the white paper to a blue background. Next, cut the painted paper into triangles … Read more… →

Distance Art Lesson: Shapes with Repeating Lines

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Abstract artwork featuring a red triangle, blue square, and purple circle with layered, multicolored striped patterns and repeating lines.

We are still fully virtual over here! I feel like I have been getting into a groove and things are going pretty well. Here is a lesson I did for kindergarten and first grade. Repetition in art means to repeat something again and again. If you have been making distance learning art lessons and have shared them on a website, please comment below! I am always looking for new ideas.

Frog and Lilypad- Claude Monet

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Drawing of a green frog sitting on a lily pad surrounded by pink flowers against a blue and purple background.

I have a whole slideshow that I will show my students about Claude Monet and his Impressionist artwork. This is a project I have adapted for distance learning. All of my kids have watercolor paints as part of their art supplies at home. I used this lesson as an idea to adapt my lesson. Usually I have the kids paint on cardboard circles, then attach lilypads using construction paper and tissue paper, but I figured most would not have tissue … Read more… →

Birds Activity for Kids Free Printable Downloads

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The cover of the book "Birds" by Carme Lemniscates features a child sitting under birds in a park with trees, offering an engaging kids activity.

Hi! The winner of the Createures game is Karen Riehle. Congrats! I love GIVEAWAYS. Another one will be coming soon in the next couple of weeks! (Amazon Affiliate links have been used at no cost to you.) Candlewick Press sent me a review copy of the book Birds by Carme Lemniscates, along with a few free activity downloads to share with you. See the bottom of this blog post for the bird activity printable downloads. Birds is a thoughtful, poetic homage … Read more… →

ABC Books for the Art Room

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ABC Books for the Art Room

Don’t forget to enter for your chance to win the new drawing prompt game Createures. Enter by reading the details on the last blog post. I love using children’s books in the Art classroom. Over the years I have collected variety of books related to art, artists, themes we study or simply have inspiring pictures. This blog post is a round-up of several ABC books that I like to use in Art class. The first one is called B is … Read more… →

Glue Line Spider Webs with Model Magic

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Glue Line Spider Webs with Model Magic

I got this idea from my son’s afterschool program… they were making these one day a couple weeks ago and I loved them some much I decided to use the idea for my own classroom right away! My son’s after school program is great, they are always doing fun art projects and they have a wonderful new facility. I would link to them, but for personal privacy reasons I hesitate to put that info online. I did some searching and … Read more… →

Alphabet Monsters

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Alphabet Monsters

My 1st graders had read a variety of ABC books about art and we made letters that were illustrated with objects that started with that letter. To finish up our unit on alphabet related art, we made these cute ABC monsters. I bought the cardboard letters from Discount School Supply. These were colored with Kwik Stix (Amazon affiliate link) and then eyes, hair and mouths were added with construction paper.

  • Banner with colorful artwork promoting an art shop featuring kindness coloring pages, artist activities, and resources for teachers.