More Winter Art Ideas

Hello everyone,

Here are a few snaps of some of  our Winter Art:

We were working on Winter Trees and Polar Bear silhouettes.

Again, similar to our Autumn Trees, I just let them go for it with their trees, just this time, we painted on some nice blue card for a wintery feel. The next day we finger printed on some snow flakes and a sprinkling of glitter for added sparkle.

Next up was our Polar Bear silhouettes. We've had a bear theme for the month of December and the little ones loved learning about Polar Bears. The initial plan was to use white and print with blue paint, a little like this idea from Pinterest.

Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/206250857908926971/

However, after another brilliant brainwave from one of our SNA's who is way more artistic than me, was to get the children to use a variety of colours and create a Northern Light effect. Genius!

So swiping and mixing a variety of colours of their own choice was so much more effective. Here's the end result.

If you've any nice Winter art ideas you want to share, feel free!

Seasonal Surprises - Gingerbread Playdough

Hello everyone and happy Thursday! What a busy but fast week!

Thought I'd share something fun which we're using tomorrow, something I made in a fit of seasonal spontaneity this afternoon!

Gingerbread scented playdough. Can I just stress, this smells aaaammmmaaaazzzziiiinnnngggg! I love adding scents and flavours to playdough, the children love it, it is a lovely sensory treat and the added bonus is that it makes the classroom smell great too!

We've been doing a little work on The Gingerbread Man so making Gingerbread men at the playdough table was always going to happen and what better way than to actually let the children get a whiff of what The Gingerbread Man would have actually smelled like.

   

Here's the recipe:

• 2 cups of plain flour
• 1 cup of salt
• 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
• 2 heaped tablespoons of Cream of Tartar
• 1.5 cups of boiling water (add gradually, you mightn't need it all!)
• 1 tablespoon of ground ginger
• 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon
• a few drops of Glycerine (not essential, it's just an option to make your playdough shiny!)

Someone messaged me recently about Cream of Tartar, it can be hard to find and expensive in the likes of Tesco, so I stock up whenever I see it in Aldi. At only 75c a tub there, it's a bargain!

Let me know if you try it.

Teachers - 10 things to be thankful for

Had a hectic day? Questioning life? Nativity Play driving you loco? It's days like these that you need to pour a strong coffee with all the sugar, push alllllllll work to the side and switch off! The correcting can wait until tomorrow. There is no guilt like teacher guilt and sometimes we need to make sure we don't let ourselves become consumed by it. Leave the day behind you and start afresh.

As mad your day may have been, when you begin to descend back to Earth, it's impossible to ignore that there are always a million reasons to still be thankful that you are a teacher. Many say teaching is a thankless job. It's not. Yes, some days may be horrendous but someone will have appreciated your effort and someone will have been thankful!

I had a crazy day. It was busy, interrupted, mixed up and noisy - one of those days where very little on my 'To do' list got ticked off! Despite facing a ghastly dose of traffic on the journey home, it actually left me plenty of time to mull things over and remember so many little aspects of my career that I'm thankful for.

Here's a few:

1. I have 28 kids without actually having kids! They're mine. For five and a half hours a day!

2. Knowing that the tiniest, little bit of praise can make a child's day. Think of  that feeling when you see their face light up with pride.

3. Your recycling bin takes much longer to fill because you bring all egg cartons, cardboard, plastic pots and punnets in to school. Thank you Junk Art. Winning!

4. No day is ever the same. (Please God, don't let me have a day like today again for a while though!!)

5. You get to read your favourite books and stories. Passing on the love of a story and characters to another generation. Magic.

6. Tea. I'm thankful for all the tea. Especially with this weather! (It's the little things in life.)

7. There is no welcome like the welcome of 28 Juniors every morning. Those happy little faces, genuinely excited to see you. Priceless.

8. The lightbulb moment. When a student 'gets it'. When the penny drops. Mission accomplished. Hands down, best teacher feeling, ever.

9 Your colleagues. If you're like myself and lucky to work alongside a fabulous group of people, then that's definitely a huge bonus. Mutual support and teamwork, makes school life a lot easier!

10. You are making a difference. Sometimes those little structured five hours are the only structure a child may have in that entire day. You are providing that structure, that security, that safety.

There is not one person in this entire world who could possibly love their job every living breathing minute of the day. I'm thankful I survived today and that my mother in law has the best supplied sweetie drawer in the country, for today I telling myself that I've earned all the calories!

Happy Thanksgiving to all Little Miss Teacher's followers stateside!

Angelic Art

Angel Art - Festive Ideas - Little Miss Teacher

With five weeks to Christmas I think I'm safe to be starting the Festive Art! On Friday we made our Angels which tied in nicely with a bit of Religion too.

It's hard to avoid the occasional bit of hand-print art with the babies, and when they're cute like this, I don't mind doing it now and again!

Hand printing - Angel Art - Festive Ideas - Little Miss Teacher

Angel Art - Festive Ideas - Little Miss Teacher

  

Although at 1.30pm on Friday when I was cleaning up glitter, I was questioning my sanity! I always say glitter is a good idea....but maybe not on a Friday afternoon!

Whooooooo's been making owls?

We've been learning about owls in infants and one of our final activities to do was this cute owl art. This is what the creative table consisted off this morning. It went much better than last time because we used PVA glue instead of glue sticks - the sugar paper went a bit mushy on the glue sticks last year for some reason!

So eveyone got a big A3 owl template. Paper is fine, the glue and brown sugar paper will stiffen when they dry anyway!

Shredded brown sugar paper - tearing it up is a good fine motor exercise!

Yes, yes, I use paintbrushes for glue!

I had pages upon pages of spare eyes from something last year so they were put to good use today, finally! Adding eyes and a beak were the finally touches! 

A lovely little activity, which took a good bit of focus, persevering and concentration from all.

Spot the photobomb :-)

They're going to be delighted to see their owls on the window tomorrow! It's the little things!

Winter Art Ideas

Winter Art - Rang a Sé - Little Miss Teacher

I've been pinning away on Pinterest - there are so many lovely 'Winter Art' ideas out there! I know, I know, how many art activities can you actually do in six weeks? But sure there's no harm having plenty of ideas!

I've pinned some nice ones to my 'Winter Art Ideas' board on Pinterest:

https://www.pinterest.com/LMissTeacher/winter-art-ideas/

Happy pinning!

Caution! Bear hunt in progress!

There's been great excitement over the past few days setting up our latest small world area.

It's rough and ready but totally do-able with a variety of 'on hand' materials.

'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' by Michael Rosen is a fabulous story for recount, sequencing, oral language, drama, letter recognition.... everything and anything really!!

It also makes for a super, small world station. Here's what we have so far. Obviously the children are going to add to it more over the next few weeks with their creations at the Junk Art and Construction Stations, but I think we've made a good start!

Thankfully I do I have a great sized classroom so I made a little corner behind the library and some of my Ikea units, to create a cosy, fictional, little land.

My attempt at a canopy over the cave area consists of a blanket
 and some twinkly lights from Ikea - far from complicated!

First up is our 'long wavy grass'..... or a variety of green fabric!

Uh oh! Mud - thick, oozy mud! Again, more chuncks of brown material here!

Then our river! Splash, splosh!

Don't forget the forest. I found part of an old artificial Christmas tree in the Art Store today. They branches are flexible which is perfect for our trees. Added a hession bag for the forest floor then to finish it off.

Next our snowstorm. Net curtain and some lovely shiny foil material from ReCreate.ie.

The children suggested using our crazy daisies and flower discs for snowflakes - genius!

Oh no! A snowstorm! A whirling, twirling snowstorm!

Lastly our bear cave. It's all child led, so their suggestion was a big box. And hey presto!

Tiptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe! "What's that?"

We also have the dolls house around the area too, forgot to photograph that unfortunately! 

Finally, some bear visuals for inspiration too. Handy for letter recognition and sounding too!

All 'Bear Hunt' images are from Twinkl!

http://www.twinkl.co.uk/resources/story-resources-bear-hunt

Happy hunting!

Art challenge - Infants

Hi everyone,

You might have seen a peek of these on my Snapchat on Friday so here's the detail!

I love to challenge the little ones as much as possible in art. Yes, templates can't be avoided sometimes but isn't it lovely when you just put them in control of their creations?

To the controlling eyes, these mightn't be your cup of tea, but I was thrilled with how they turned out!

So obviously we've been doing a lot of work on shapes since September and concentric circle art fell nicely into place.

To start, at one of our stations for Aistear, the children drew the circles all by themselves with pencils. Starting from the inside out, using up as much of their page as possible. They're not perfect circles, but what odds?

The next step was to trace over the pencils with sharpies. This just made it easier for them to follow the lines when painting.

Apart from keeping an eye on paint running low, there was very little guidance needed after that and I was thrilled with their finished pieces!

Simple, but effective!