Meowing at Midnight: Kindergarten Edition

Kindergarteners sure loved this lesson.  We were inspired by this print by Nick Gustafson.  I mean WHO DOESN'T like a cat with crazy patterns? But really, the kiddos were more concerned that the moon was yellow and not silvery gray.  With that we got a impromptu lesson on moon phases and the harvest moon.  But aren't these guys cute?

Disclaimer: No cat tails were harmed in the making of this project.  Seriously--those are some tricky shapes to cut around and maybe 2 lost their tails.  I'll take that any day.  Maybe our cutting endurance is paying off? 

To go along with the lesson we read Cat's Night Out, it's filled with rhyming wonderfuls and counting by twos. 

Dinosaurs Love Underpants

Have you ever seen this book?

There are several of these books and when I saw this book at the bookstore I immediately sat done and read through it.  (Yes, in the children's section...I'm the type that doesn't look for a chair, the floor will do as I'm perusing the shelves). I had many laugh out loud moments while flipping through the pages, and I'm pretty sure the 7 year old boy next to me thought I had some serious problems.  But any who, this book gives us a different side on how the dinosaurs became extinct.  Ultimately, the dinosaurs kept stealing the cavemen's undies so there was a massive war that wiped those stealing dinos out.  Yeah totally silly, but awesome.  I just had to do a project about it and let me tell you talking about underpants with 1st graders was so funny, I'd suggest trying it if you haven't.  After they got over the fact that we were talking about underwear, we started in on this fun project.  

To start the project we painted massive amounts of beautiful painted paper,  this also gave us a wonderful opportunity to explore texture with out texture tools.

As the focus wasn't on the actual drawing of the dinosaur, I gave 1st graders the choice between a Triceratops and T-Rex stencil to use.  To make our underpants  1st graders used funkified colors and PATTERNS.