Sometimes I say "y'all" because I spent the first 8 years of my life in Dallas, TX. Gotta keep in touch with my southern roots!
Today's linky with Freebielicious is Throwback Thursday!
Now, I was checking out some of the other blogger's links and a lot of people had put up old blog posts. I got pretty worried since you can clearly see that this is only my 4th post EVER. But I kept clicking and saw that some other bloggers had just written back about things that had done during the school year. Well, I can do that! So, here is my very favorite art project that I have ever done!
I live in Arizona, and we have a very unique environment down in the southern part of the state. It's all full of prickly things and things that bite and sting. Our most famous Sonoran Desert plant has got to be the saguaro (suh-war-oh) cactus. My first grade team does a huge desert unit in the spring, and we go to the Desert Museum, and I thought it would be SO MUCH FUN to make mini models of saguaros! Out of paper mache. Yup, the messy, gooey, flour/water/newspaper stuff. So, we did!
First, we covered toilet paper rolls with paper mache. I made my husband help me save all the rolls for, like, 4 months. I made little newspaper rolls for the arms and taped them on with masking tape, and then showed the kiddos how to layer on the gooey paper mache. I did have to go back and fix most of them, but some students did an amazing job! Paper mache is hard for firsties, y'all!
After it was all dry we went back and painted our cacti green and painted the dirt brown.
The we added details such as the pleats in the cacti and the cactus flowers on the top. They could also add details to their dirt such as other animals or water.
Then, because I'm a little cray-cray, we made desert animals out of clay, waited for the clay to dry, and then painted our desert animals. I meant to buy Crayola Model Art Magic, but accidentally bought Crayola regular-old-clay, soooo most of the animals broke apart and I hot glued them all back together/on to the plates.
The animal that they made was the same as the animal that they researched. Each kiddo picked an animal, and then they were put into groups based on that animal, and then we researched and wrote reports!
Part of the research was done on our first grade field trip to the Desert Museum where they got to see their animal FOR REAL. They then had to read the signs about their animal and record the info. (In reality each group had a parent volunteer to help with the reading/recording.)
In theory the animals were supposed to be painted realistically, but I kept having kiddos absent, so their animal kept sitting there being all sad and unpainted. By the end it was like, "Just paint it please, and no I don't care what color you use!"
Hope you enjoyed my throwback!
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