Thank You and You!

Thank you to my friend, Kristina for the ribbons and Thank you to YOU for the idea! SAW IT HERE on the amazing Dragon in My Art Room Blog (Thanks Phyl;) and SAW IT HERE at Kids Artists any other places you have seen this lesson let me know in the comments.

My friend donated a huge bag of ribbon remnants to the art room just about the same time some of you were posting your Princess and the Pea illustration lessons. It seemed like a perfect match! This year our budget for supplies was tiny, so I find myself getting inspired by materials to do different lessons rather the other way around (you get what I mean.) I am happy to have the kids work with ANYTHING people donate.

I did this lesson with my 1st graders. . . I'm not going to lie it was a little too hard for my bilingual first graders (due to too many kids and too many supplies) and JUST RIGHT for my other first graders. I feel like Goldilocks when I'm lesson planning! I have bilingual, advanced, special needs and everything in between no two classes are even similar so I have need to find a way to adapt this lesson. I first realized this was going to be a challenge with my bilingual first graders when the whole class BURST into laughter when I said the word pea. I literally had to go get my lunch which thank goodness had a pea in it to show them what a pea was. . . not many knew what it was after seeing it. I guess we might have to try peas next class! This project keeps getting bigger and bigger!

First we read this book

If you haven't seen it the illustrations are beautiful and the story simple and straight to the point. This project is going to take two weeks so I plan on reading a different version to my classes next week after they finish drawing their princesses. For my bilingual class I found a version on YouTube that was nicely animated, subtitled (not that they were reading it!) because I thought it would be better then the long version that I will read next week to the other students. I projected it big with my projector which was their favorite part. That projector was worth every penny, thanks Nick (my hubby.)


Next, we talked about rulers. We discussed what rulers do and how to use them to measure. I demonstrated how to measure their ribbon and mark it at the 6" mark. Then I demonstrated cutting it on the mark. I think some of the higher level kids in every class got this concept immediately (or else someone had taught them well) the rest of the kids struggled until I went around to and showed them. If nothing else I wanted them to begin to understand that artists can use a ruler to measure. Earth shattering I know.

The most fun part was picking which ribbons to measure and cut!

After cutting a bunch of ribbons equal length, they glued them to create the mattresses. This took one whole hour class.

Next class we made the princess, ladder and pea. We watched or read another version of the story. Next class, I want to use our Princess and the Pea illustrations to do some simple counting and writing exercise. Very simple. Any ideas?