Wednesday, December 5, 2012

It's Pumpking Time!




I guess you know you're behind on posting when still posting fall things as winter begins.  This lesson has been floating around the web and is so cute I thought I'd give it a try this year and found it to be a great early art activity for the little guys.  I'm on the cart and am always looking for ideas that are easy to organize and implement in the kindergarten room and this fit the bill, plus it gave us time to work on naming and  cutting basic shapes, practicing careful gluing, and arranging shapes to represent the features of the face.  
To begin I gave each child a black 9 X 12 inch paper on which I had glued a large white oval.  We read "It's Pumpkin Time", which is available in big book format.  We mixed up some orange paint and painted our pumpkins on day one. 

On day two students were shown how to cut a circle from a square by carefully snipping the corners, and how to cut an oval from a rectangle in the same way.  Long strips of paper trims were handed out for snipping teeth. 
I've switched over to using Elmer's tiniest glue bottles for all my students.  Yes, they're kind of a pain to refill, but they are easy to handle and don't clog up like the big bottles.  We practiced opening and closing the bottles and using small dots of glue.  I love these little bottles because kids don't seem to engage in excessive squeezing or become mesmerized with falling glue like they do with the larger size.
I really love Shari Halpern's illustrations in  "It's Pumpkin Time". so bright and cheery.  And the big book format can't be beat.  I found a cute little" life of a pumpkin" sequencing PDF to use as a filler activity for early finishers and you can check it out  here .
Another lovely book illustrated by Shari Halpern that would be a great accompaniment to apple printing or other fall inspiring art.

A little late for this year, but bookmark it for next year!  Love those robins.

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