Spring Ideas and the Poet Tree

Last year, I worked in a 4th and 5th grade Behavior Learning Center. I was lucky enough to be able to do many fun art activities. We also read and wrote poetry. The students loved being creative and producing work that they took pride in. 

Water color butterflies on canvas. 

I had groups of students paint water color paper with liquid water color paint. Then, we used a butterfly punch to punch out the pretty insects. Finally, we hot glued them on canvas that had been painted blue. They turned out lovely!

   

Lots of Spring art. 

Frogs were made out of green bags, die cut circles, and accordion folded strips of paper. We also made cool flowers out of recycled magazines. 

Here we used black paint to paint the branches and the bottom of a 1 liter soda bottle to stamp pink paint blossom. 

The Poet Tree

Everyday we celebrated poems written by students with "snaps". Students were so proud of their work. Every time they wrote a poem, they would put it on the Poet Tree. The end of the unit was celebrated with a "Poetry Jam" attended by parents, administrators, teachers, and other students. Every student in the class wrote poems and read their own work. The audience showed their appreciation with finger snaps. It was a very heart warming day for me. Students is this class very rarely feel proud of themselves. This day they were Rock Stars!