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Category Archives: 1st grade

Lego Art Projects

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Lego Art Projects

Our school is building an addition, so I thought projects related to “building” would be fun.  Legos are the perfect building blocks! So, we designed our own mini-figures with this template.  I originally saw this idea from The Art Teacher’s Closet. We also stamped with Legos (idea via Lego Stamping from Filth Wizardry).  Thanks to wonderful bloggers for these two ideas!  My students LOVED them!  They were so excited about these proejcts. Place your piece of paper on top of … Read more… →

Back to School Bulletin Board

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Back to School Bulletin Board

Well, another school year has begun! We’ve had one week of classes and I have been pleased with my student’s behavior, effort and creativity thus far. What I was not pleased with was catching strep throat the first week of school!  I had to stay home the second day.  🙁  My daughter got sick the week before, so I that is where I got my illness from.  I am mostly back to normal now, so let’s hope the rest of … Read more… →

Watercolor Bird Paintings by First Graders

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Watercolor Bird Paintings by First Graders

I love these charming birds by the 1st graders!  So colorful and a beautiful experience with watercolors. We read the lovely book The Boy Who Drew Birds, which is about the naturalist/artist John James Audubon.  It is a great book that tells the story of how he loved to study birds and spent his free time as a child drawing and observing nature.  Audubon banded birds to see if the same birds returned each year.  It is a great book … Read more… →

Fabric Dolls by the 1st Graders

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Handmade doll with brown hair, a colorful dress, and blue fabric legs, suitable for 1st graders, laying on a light-colored surface.

Here are some of our cute fabric dolls the 1st graders made.  We used a lot of wrapping, tying and hot glue.  I would recommend having an older student helper or a couple of parent volunteers.  I’m trying to find an easier way to make fabric dolls with kids.  Any ideas?  These are very cute, but the kids needed a lot of help.   Google

Clay Butterflies for 1st Grade

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Clay Butterflies for 1st Grade

The first graders had a blast rolling out clay slabs, tracing their butterfly, cutting the clay and stamping textures in the clay.  Do you remember the game Perfection?  When I coordinated a summer day camp, we had this game and the kids loved it.  Then one day, the game stopped working and we couldn’t fix it.  What to do with the pieces?  They are perfect for stamping into clay and also for stamping with paint!  I have used these pieces … Read more… →

Styrofoam Weaving for 1st Grade

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Styrofoam Weaving for 1st Grade

Weaving on styrofoam is really easy to do! There is a great restaurant supply store near my school where I can buy meat trays in bulk and have them last for years. 1.  Cut slits on the edges of two sides. 2.  Loop a sturdy string or yarn up and down the slits. 3.  Weave over and under using pieces of yarn, ribbons, pipe cleaners, feathers or rolled tissue paper. 4.  Trim the edges that hang over.

Complementary Color Collages– 1st Grade

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Colorful abstract collage featuring geometric shapes in orange, blue, and neon red on a clean white background using complementary colors.

Complementary Color Collages by the 1st Grade This project introduces the first graders to complementary colors.  I show them the color wheel and I explain how the complementary colors are across from each other on the color wheel.  They are the “opposites”.  If you mix the two of them together you would get a brownish or grayish color.  We talk about the primary/secondary colors and focus on the pairs of red + green, blue + orange, and violet + yellow.  … Read more… →

Treasure Boxes– After School Art Class

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A hand holds a colorful small opened box with a decorated interior and exterior.

  We made Treasure Boxes at an after school art class that I taught this month.  The students were in grades K-6 (about 12 kids).    I picked up cigar boxes from a local shop and the kids were able to decorate them with the plethora of supplies I had. We used wall paper scraps, wrapping paper, magazines, stickers, scrapbook papers…. colored tape… Each kid could decorate the box however they wanted. I showed them pictures of Joseph Cornell‘s mysterious … Read more… →

1st grade Sunflowers

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1st grade Sunflowers

Sunflowers Last year, when the 1st graders were in kindergarten, they planted sunflower seeds in the garden in the back of the school. Over the summer, these flowers grew tall and bloomed radiantly. Each child also brought home a small pot with a sunflower seed in it. Many of the students watched their sunflower grow big and strong. When we returned to school this year, some of the sunflowers were cut from the garden and placed around the art room … Read more… →

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