Dr. Seuss Lorax Tree Art

This week we had Monday and Tuesday off from school.
Monday for a snow day and Tuesday for election day here in Ohio.
My nieces and I spent Monday evening working on some art work that I was inspired by pinterest to try. 
We also paintined Dr. Seuss Lorax trees because the girls recently watched the movie, and who doesn't love Dr. Seuss inspired crazy trees :)


We used paper grocery sacks from Kroger, a mountain dew bottle, paint, and an old pickle jar lid to put the paint in.


Use the bottom of the pop bottle as a stamp




the lid works as a stamp too!




winter, spring, and summer







Once we filled all the paper bags we held an art auction in the kitchen and sold the paintings to my parents (their grandparents) for .25-1.00.  My nieces' idea... they are little entrepreneurs!  

Art class with kids: following instructions

My art class has about 12 students in it, so it should be quite manageable, right?
well there is one child who tests me repeatedly.
In order to make him more involved and attentive for the entire hour long class I came up with this project to get them to follow step by step instructions, to learn about horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, and to show them that there is no wrong way to do art and even when we all follow the same steps we come out with very different outcomes!

They all started with a blank piece of paper and I gave them the following instructions:

1. draw 3 vertical lines
2. draw 2 horizontal lines
3. draw 1 diagonal line
4. draw one large circle
5. draw a triangle
6. draw 3 small circles
7. draw a square

then I said fill one space in with dots, fill one space in with stripes, with numbers, smiley faces, squiggle lines, zig zags, color one in completely, etc.
Every once in a while I said fill one in with anything you want and they got so excited!! I was impressed to see their creativity too.  Some filled their space with question marks, sunshines, their name, hearts...
and it fill up my entire hour time slot and kept their full attention!
whew.

Art class with kids: recycling art

At the Montessori School this week we made shadowboxes out of cereal boxes and magazine scraps.
I had so much fun making my demonstration box that I want to keep it!
only problem is, like I've mentioned I live in 300sq feet and it is filling up with "art projects" :/

What you do is cut a square out of the front of a cereal box to make the frame for your shadow box.
Then on the piece of cardboard that you cut out you start gluing magazine scraps to make a scene. I think it looks better when some of the pieces stick out to make it look 3D, like the grass.
An underwater scene would be awesome don't you think?
and it's a free, recyclable craft you can do with your kids :)