The Little Red Hen

We read the story of "The Little Red Hen," and made some cute construction paper pictures of a red hen to go with it.  I forgot to take pictures of the process and set-up (fail), but I do have a photo of some of the end products.  I was surprised to see how different each one looked in the end!

We started by cutting a curve along one side of a red rectangle (this was our hen's body).  Some of the younger kiddos had a hard time cutting a curve line without a guide, so we drew a line onto their rectangle to help them out!  We then glued that onto a piece of brown construction paper.  Next each child got a small orange square that they needed to cut into a triangle shape and glue it onto one side of red hen body.  Then we added on googly eye (the kids love these)!  We talked about how if you are looking at a profile view of a person or animal, you only see one eye (I demonstrate by turning my head to the side so they understand), otherwise they will all want to put on two eyes.  We finnished up by gluing on some strips of yellow paper to be the wheat (which some kids used to be legs I think..).  They were super fun to create and I especially love some of the creative "skinny" looking hens : )

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly...

The kids absolutely love this story!  I read them the version of this popular story by Sims Taback.  We also had other stories that the children could explore. They thought it was hilarious; and it makes complete sense to them that at the end of the story, she swallowed a horse and died of course!

I figured that finding fly swatters in February might be difficult, but of course the Dollar Tree came through, and I was able to pick up a couple of fly swatters.  We placed the paint in meat trays in the middle of the table and the kids dipped the fly swatter into the paint (GENTLY).

Then they swatted their paper with it.  They LOVED the process!

 However I do have to warn you.....it does get messy (but fun)!  We decided with the long handles of the fly swatters it would be much easier to stand and do this project.

3 Little Pigs

During the month of February our theme was Folktales. As I searched the web; I found that there weren't a whole lot of art projects to be found for folktales that other people have tried out.  So that forced me to think outside the box and create my own. One of the projects we did represented the houses from the 3 little pigs folktale.  I read online some ideas for art projects; and combined them for this project.

On a large piece of construction paper (12x18) we used wooden craft sticks (popsicle sticks), dry spaghetti noodles, and red construction paper rectangles.

With older kiddos you could have then cut their own roof and door for each house.  I knew the gluing in this project would take their little hands awhile so I decided to do that ahead of time for them.

Although all the kids were given the same materials, each picture turned out different!

I LOVE how some are more abstract than others, and how some kids were so precise.

We used this project to work on story sequencing  as well.  Notice how the houses go from left to right- straw, sticks, bricks.  Many of the kids then used their pictures to re-tell the story to someone at home.