Kindergarten Lupine Blossoms

Well we're just a couple days away from the official beginning of Spring.  Although, here in Nebraska we've had a cold winter we really didn't have a lot of snow (only one snow days worth to be exact).  The temperature is rising and it's been my mission to get anything with that winter feel out of the hallway and replace it with spring!

Here is a one day lesson I did with kindergarten.  I found the idea for this lesson here.  I don't know about you, but for me I love having one day kindergarten lessons.  I find going back for the second day can sometimes be chaotic as the students are always at a different pace and immediately need something to do when they are done.  Kindergarten is certainly a struggle for me.  I'm constantly trying to think of new ideas that are really process driven and not just "doing," but I find myself sometimes just "doing" more then I'd like.  

With that being said here was a fun one day lesson that was nice and springy and the kids LOVED it.  I first started out with my classes only using orange paper, but decided to switch it up and throw in some yellow and blue.  I think the blue is my favorite, what do you think?  I went around and gave everybody a little bit of gold paint and put it right on their paper. They spread it around as much as they could (most did not  cover the entire page) then they went in with a texture scraper or a fork. Kindergartners watched me paint two green stems and a few leaves and they followed suit.

The next and finals steps were a little scary.  As I have never embarked in "finger painting," we talked about what we can and cannot do.  When all of that was said and done I went around and gave each table a little purple paint.  When I saw that most students had a decent amount of purple dots on the paper I added some pink paint and finally finished with white.  I found that it was easier for students to make the blossom dots by using 2 or 3 fingers at the same time rather than just one.

If we had time at the end of the class I read "Miss Rumphius" by Barbara Cooney.  There are also a couple of good readings of the book on YouTube.