Art Project for Mother's Day

This watercolor project is a third in a series I've written at Bright Hub. It is for Mother's Day, or for any spring day in art. You are creating flowers on a watercolor background. The flowers can be daisies, mums, pansies or simple white flowers stamped on in acrylic paint. Its easy to do and fun for kids. The article link is: www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/articles/30441.aspx
If you like this project, or have one of your own, let me know at this blog.

Creative Ways to Get Students to Read and Report

An article at BrightHub caught my attention because it was about writing book reports in a new way. The article talked about reading a book and creating a blog about it, then leaving the book for someone else to find. Here is an excert form the article: There is a website, www.bookcrossing.com, where students may go and register the book they have read. They then write a blurb about their book and receive an identification number. To complete this project, students write the ID number in the book and then leave their book somewhere with a note to whomever finds it. Using this website, students participate in a modern, technologically advanced “message in a bottle” activity.

The full article can be found at:
Help Students Think Outside The Box With These Book Project Ideas.

Smart Ways to Use the Smartboard Series

I've written 3 articlesS in a series called Smart Ways to Use the Smartboard. The first one deals with uses of the Smartboard in daily classroom routines, reading and writing activities. The 2nd article deals more the Smartboard specifically in math lessons, the 3rd is for science lessons. All 3 give easy ways to use the Smartboard's drawing tools, pictures and backgrounds, multimedia and online resources. The resources are mostly from the UK. The math resources provide an excellent site with 90 math activities. There also some great online science sites to go to. Check the article out at www.brighthub.com

Smart Ways to Use the SMARTboard series
Smart Ways to Use the SMARTboard in Math Lessons
Smart Ways to Use the SMARTboard in Science Lessons

Mathletics Website fo Math Motivation

For the next 2 weeks, grade 2 and 3's will be doing a trial demonstration of a product from 3p Learning at www.mathletics.com This program had the world math day timed math contest for students to play against other students in the world. The student gets to design their own avatar before they begin the games. The program also offers math lessons that a teacher can require students to perform at a level between 1 and 5. The lessons are start with a pre-quiz, several lessons that can be repeated and then a post quiz.

The motivation to perform the lessons is that gaining gold bars will allow more games to be unlocked by a student. It is very motivating math and something that students will likely enjoy. By participating in the 2 week trial, the students can access their accounts from home, to try it out after school hours. Seems like a fun program. If you've tried it before or would like to comment, please post a reply. I will be reporting how the demo went, to see if we do decide to purchase this program for our school.

Watercolor Art Project for Spring

Watercolor art projects are so easy to do and design. The latest project I designed involves a stormy sky, a rainbow and a child holding an umbrella. If students can't draw the child they can just paint the background and have a separate painting of an umbrella and a pair of boots. You then cut out the umbrella and boots and glue them on to the background with a sponge holding them away from the background. Simple and cute.
Watercolor Art Project for Spring
Check out the article on the materials and procedures. It is part of a series on watercolor art projects that I have written at Bright Hub. As I do more watercolor projects I will post them. If there are any art ideas that you would like to add, please comment.

St. Patrick's Day Project

On March 17, I found a quick easy art project to teach about creating color. The color was green of course. I simply had students divide a 12" paper into 6 equal parts. At one end we painted blue and at the other end yellow. Then as you move toward the center, paint each section a green. On one end paint more yellow than blue, on the other end, the blue end, paint more blue than yellow. Create various greens that blend into each other. We found tempra paint to work poorly compared to acrylic paint. So, if you want to teach about blending colors, or the differences between tempra and acrylic paint, or between blending colors on paper or on a paint tray, then try this simple lesson. The kids enjoyed learning about color blending without having to accomplish a great masterpiece. This was done at grade 4 and 5 level.

Science Project - Gr. 4 - 6 Plants & Space

The CSA, Canadian Space Agency has an excellent scientific experiment for kids to perform with tomato seeds. At a website called Tomatosphere, you can learn all about ways to use tomatoes to help actual astronaut test conditions in space. By registering your class or school with the project, they will send you 2 packages of tomato seeds, one of which is a control group and one which has been exposed to conditions like those on Mars. The seed packages are labelled M and N. Students grow them and find the rate of germination. Experiments are easy to set up. Students send in their results to the website. Later they are informed which package of seeds are the control group.
Its an exciting hands-on project. There are videos to support it. Many teacher resources are included on the website. We have done this project last year and unless you back out, you carry on the project for 3 consecutive years. Try it out! Try www.tomatosphere.org to see it.

To see a video of the project click here:http://www.tomatosphere.org/media-room/vids/mFincke.wmv