Valentine’s Day- Filled with Process Art and Kindness

We celebrated Valentines with one of their favorite things: Process Art! Young children enjoy the process of creating way more than the end product. That is why kids will sometimes paint a picture and then “ruin” it by brushing paint all over it until it is completely covered with all colors of paint mixed together until it’s all gray.  But they don’t care. They had fun creating and exploring the art material and in their eyes, that is what they care about. As they grow older they start to care more about both together. I set out things that they could creat with with no directions accept “You are the artist, make it however you want to make it!”

I set out loose parts with play dough for them to create with but sadly did not get any pictures!

I let them create a collaborative art piece on a large sheet of butcher paper.



Here they explored with liquid watercolors and how the colors spread together on doilies. 





They had free rein to decorate their Valentine card holders. 







They explored by spraying liquid watercolor from spray bottles onto paper they covered in hearts. They loved the effect this created!

They wrote love poems. We have just started working on trying to put spaces between words and we learned the sight word love!

To pass out Valentine’s, each child took a turn sitting in the Chair of Honor.” Then I called each table up to give their friend their Valentine and say something kind about them. I was amazed at the kind words they told them! I heard “you are special to me,” “You are a good friend,” “I love you, “You are loved,” “You are helpful,” “You are respectful/responsible,” “You are smart,” and so much more. They loved hearing what everyone had to say to them and smiled for the rest of the day!

After Valentine’s, I set out some animal habitats for them to explore. This was not an in-depth investigation, but completely play based for them to explore and learn from since we had so many snow days and 100 day coming up. They looked at the books, and created their own stories using the materials provided for each habitat. They really honed in on the winter forest animals so we focused mostly on those during our whole group lessons. 

I added a Winter Story Making area for them also.



Here are a coup,e activities in literacy and math. 

They have become very interested in the difference between two and three dimensional shapes. Playing with these shapes helps them discover the different attributes of each shape. 





100 Day is next so stay tuned for how we celebrate!

Magical Creatures- The Project

The kids wanted to make a dragon after our study of mythical creatures. We brainstormed together what we would need: and got to work! First we made dragon eggs for our dragon to hatch!



Then we got to work on our dragon! They voted on the colors.

They were worried their eggs and project might get touched or broken so we brainstormed what kind of signs would help with that! This shows kids a natural purpose for writing! They wrote the signs without thinking of it as “work” or an assignment. They did it because they felt they needed to!







The kids also made themselves into mythical creatures and gave them unique names. They loved this and giggled about it the whole time. 



For a shared writing lesson we came up with what we now knew about dragons and unicorns...their two favorite mythical creatures. They are becoming aware of blends and digraphs and would point them out excitedly every time they heard one so I underlined them for them. They are also becoming aware of the “ing” chunk in words.











In writing we learned how to make characters in our stories show movement. These art manikins were perfect for that! We called them Oval Man since we made each part using ovals. Then we made them into whoever our character was supposed to be by adding details. 

Mythical creatures was new and fun for me to learn with them. This investigation produced many verbal and written stories and a lot of imaginative play and art! I am so glad they showed an interest in this and am curious where their interests will take us next!