Tag: art

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Summer STEAM Activites For Kids

Summer is my favorite season for STEAM kid’s activities (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) because it’s easier to clean up! Yes, I know. That’s maybe not the best reasoning. But it’s a very valid reason. STEAM activities can get messy, but taking them outside helps the cleanup process become faster and easier. Here are some of our favorite STEAM activities, along with a few cleaning up tips! 

Sunscreen Painting: I found this gem activity on Pinterest, but we’ve been doing it on repeat at our house! Take a dark sheet of construction paper (black, blue, deep reds, etc) and paint with sunscreen! Leave it out in the sun for a few hours to dry, then come back and see the work you’ve created. It was such a great conversation about sunscreen and how it can help our skin while we’re out playing in the sunshine. 

Oobleck: Such a classic, messy sensory activity. The non-newtonian substance is addicting for kids and adults to play with! I love playing with this in a plastic bin or bowl outside because cleanup is just a simple hose down of everything. Because it’s made of cornstarch and water, it’s safe to hose down into the grass or down the gutter. Please use your best judgment with this and verify if it’s safe for you to do so in your own area or not. 

Diet Coke + Mentos: We all know this activity is also for adult enjoyment, as well as kid entertainment and education. The science behind Diet Coke and Mentos is really fascinating. And if you’re still scratching your head about why it’s a physical reaction instead of a chemical reaction, we’ve got you covered! Check out our article on Chemical vs. Physical Changes.  

Egg Drop: A perfect excuse to use up all of that recycling that’s taking up a corner of your garage (I’m not the only one, right?) Find different ways to protect your egg at different heights of dropping them. The garden hose is also the MVP when it comes to clean up.  

S’mores with Tin Foil: Setting up a little stove with tin foil to make a s’more is not only a great STEM activity, but also a great snack!  

Ice Painting: Have you ever tried painting on ice? The effect is incredible! There are a few ways you can do this. Freeze your own ice cubes or pull cubes out of your ice maker and dump them into a plastic bin or bowl to paint. Freeze a block of water in a big container and paint on the ice chunk. Or buy a bag of ice from a gas station and dump it into a bowl or bin for painting.  

Sink or Float: It may feel boring and overused to you, but I’m willing to bet your child hasn’t done the experiment dozens of times as you have. Find random toys and items, place them in a bucket of water, and see what sinks and what floats.  

Make Your Own Bubble Solution and Wands: We typically make bubble wands out of pipe cleaners, but there are so many materials you can use to create bubble wands. Leaving out different materials and letting the kids come up with their own creations is exactly what STEAM is all about! There are dozens of bubble recipes online, but this one is our favorite: 

½ C. Dish Soap
1 ½ C. Water
2 tsp Sugar

Bubble Foam: Have you tried this yet? It’s a fun outdoor STEAM activity for your kids. I use Busy Toddler’s recipe and instructions. 

Stack Pool Noodles with Shaving Cream: Slice up a pool noodle into smaller discs and build towers by using shaving cream as the “glue.” This is one that is an “outside only” activity for me. Messy play is important, but I have limits too! 

What STEAM activities are you trying out this summer? What cleaning up tips do you have for messy outside play? 

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The Power Music Has In Education

When it comes to using arts in our core curriculums, music may be one of the easiest and fastest incorporations. For almost any given topic in math, language arts, science, and reading, there is a song that already exists somewhere online for your students to learn. You don’t even have to be creative and make it up yourself, someone has already done the work for you!

Music has a way of creating a memory and keeping it safe in a child’s brain, something I’ve been able to witness with my own daughter. 

As she got older and played outside more often I started worrying about the street in front of our house. While we went on walks around our neighborhood I so badly wanted to trust that she wouldn’t bolt into the middle of the road, but I could not at just under two years old. Cue: the music. This particular tune I learned back in high school while volunteering in a daycare, and it worked wonders to teach to her. 

Look both ways, listen close my friends. 
Look left, look right, look left and right again. 
When you’re running here and there remember what they say! 
Be smart, be safe, and look both ways. 

With some instruction and repeating the song at every single opportunity, she seemed to have grasped the concept. The true test came the day more pressure was on her and the temptation to bolt across the road without looking was strong. 

Her good friend was across the busy street playing when my daughter spotted her and her only thought was, “I need to be over there.” She started sprinting down the driveway with me close on her heels yelling for her to stop. The second she saw the edge of the sidewalk she came to a halt and started singing, 

Look both ways, listen close my friends. 
Look left, look right, look left and right again. 
When you’re running here and there remember what they say! 
Be smart, be safe, and look both ways.

Her little head moved left and right, then left and right again as she stood there. She saw cars coming down the road and waited patiently for them to pass. By this time, I was standing close enough to grab her if needed, but far enough to observe. Once the road was completely clear and safe to cross, she looked back at me for approval, then crossed the street. 

I was in awe at my fiercely independent two-year-old and what she was capable of. I was astounded that simply singing a song stuck in her little mind so well that when in an unsafe situation, she was able to recall what she had learned previously. 

Music is moving. Music is incredible. Music is powerful. In this particular situation, music was life-saving.

How have you seen music play a role in education?

Cover photo: my daughter at 18 months old playing the piano

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When Science And Art Meet: Soil Painting With Ms. Heiner

Today’s post I want to feature a teacher who was an excellent representation of integrating arts into her core curriculum. Andrea Heiner teaches fourth grade in Utah, and during her science curriculum of soil layers, she used watercolors as their medium for creating a diagram. A little science, a little art, a lot of fun! Check out their great project here: 

The students started with the bottom layer, bedrock. The next day once this layer was dry, they worked on the second layer, subsoil.

Each layer shows components of what this layer of soil contains, such as rocks, roots, and even worms!

Once their paintings were finished, they added labels and descriptions for each section.

What a great example of arts integration! Great job, Ms. Heiner!

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What’s The Deal With Puppets In The Classroom?

Puppets have a special place in the classroom of littles. Using a puppet in teaching may feel like another item to worry about or check off your ever-growing to-do list, however, when used correctly, they can be powerful to students. It’s as if you have a second teacher in the classroom, a separate being with separate ideas is what they see it as. Puppets to students are magical, even when they are old enough to know better of what they are and how they work, their little brains work in the way that they look at that inanimate object as an animate object with its own thoughts and feelings, even if they are all indirectly coming from you as the puppeteer. 

Tips for using a puppet in the classroom: 

  • Use him as an example of good behaviors you want students to model.
  • Use him as an example of common problems in the classroom such as trouble with a math problem. Later, when students run into the same problem, a great reminder for them would be how the puppet solved the problem. 
  • Use him as a new storyteller in the classroom. 
  • Let the puppet introduce new topics such as persuasive writing or reading non-fiction. 
  • Let the students use the puppet as a writing audience. 
  • Turn it into an art project and allow the students to create their own puppets. 

Puppets have a big place in the classroom, whether he or she becomes a part of the classroom, or they are simply used in dramatic play for storytelling. The best part of puppets is that they can be as complicated and expensive as your limits allow, but also as simple as a sock with buttons glued on. They don’t care about the complexity of it, they just care about the magic behind it.

Do you use puppets in the classroom? What benefits do you see? 

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Reader’s Theaters: The Golden Nugget Of Arts In Core Curriculum

Reader’s theaters. A tale as old as time. Teachers have been using reader’s theaters in the classroom for years and years now because they are the golden nugget of adding in arts to our reading and language arts curriculum. 

Students can work on reading, reading out loud, reading with emotion, drama/acting, and more while practicing and performing a reader’s theater. 

Ways to make an RT successful: 

  • Give it an authentic purpose and audience.  
  • Model, model, model the proper way to read for an RT. 
  • Pick an interesting topic to the students. 
  • Choose a good RT based on the reading level of your students. 
  • Utilize gyms, theaters, and stages in the school to practice reading.
  • Film the students practicing for them to go back and watch so that they can see what they look like reading out loud.  

A few websites full of good (and mostly free) reader’s theaters: 

http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm

https://www.readinga-z.com/fluency/readers-theater-scripts/

http://www.thebestclass.org/rtscripts.html

Beyond these, a simple Google, Pinterest, or Teachers Pay Teachers search can also lead you to great reader’s theaters, whether free or paid. 

In my own experience, I saw reluctant readers shine through as they performed an RT on space for a younger grade learning about planets. Their confidence came through as they watched themselves get better and better in the spotlight with practice. Reading wasn’t a chore, it became fun and exciting to them. 

What are some great experiences you’ve seen while doing reader’s theaters in your classroom? 

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A Little Math, A Little Art, A Lot Of Fun

When math overrides the majority of the time throughout the day, how do we incorporate the arts? We make art mathematical! Here is a fun activity to learn about the color wheel, as well as apply fraction skills in the process of creating the color wheel. 

You’ll need a print out of a blank or semi-filled in color wheel, and modeling clay.

I used Crayola Model Magic clay for this activity. It’s soft, squishy, and will change colors when mixed! Normal clay can work just fine too. You can either let it dry and let them glue it to the page when it’s finished, or toss it back all together and store it in an airtight container for future use. 

Start with three equal pieces of clay in red, yellow, and blue. 

Leave a small reference piece behind, then with remaining clay, split into two equal pieces, creating two halves.  

Mix the colors! Write out the fractions on the paper as well. 

Orange= ½ R ½ Y 

Purple= ½ B ½ R 

Green ½ Y ½ B 

For a shorter activity, find a smaller color wheel cut into sixths and stop here. For a longer activity, continue on. For the sake of a shorter blog post, I will only model one part of the next step.

On the blue and green side- split the blue and green pieces in ½. (For reference, I pulled a new piece of blue clay for this.)

Mix the blue and green pieces to make green-blue. Green-blue is equal to ½ G, ½ B. Or it is also equal to ¼ Y ¾ B. 

The other half of the green that was split before will be used to mix with a half piece of the yellow. 

Continue the same with yellow-green, red-orange, etc. 

Common core standards: 
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.NF.A.3
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.4.NF.A.2

featured image: hosmerart.blogspot.com

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How To Effectively Use Roxaboxen In The Classroom

The first time I heard the story Roxaboxen, I was well into my college years. This saddens me, considering the book was written in 1991, a few years before I was even born! It shows what a timeless classic it has become since it’s still used in schools and read to children today. 

I fell in love with this book right away because it drew me back to my childhood when my neighborhood friends and I would spend hours a day in our driveways drawing sidewalk chalk “houses” furnished with lavish furniture and multiple rooms. We would ride our bikes from driveway to driveway to visit each other’s homes. When the rain would wash the houses away we grabbed our sidewalk chalk again and started over. This cycle lasted for years and years. 

Roxaboxen is a story about friends in Arizona who use rocks and boxes to build homes, buildings, and businesses. They have cops so cars don’t go over the speed limit, and a jail for those that do. These children create more and more every year, even making a cemetery for a lizard with an unfortunate ending. 

How can this book be used in the classroom? It teaches about community and working together. This book is an excellent vehicle for a discussion of the topics, whatever the age group. It can give a brief introduction into the life cycle, watching the creation and expansion of the town, then later on how it was deserted once the children grew up. Also, not to mention- the lizard. 

Think of the beautiful creations children can create of their own communities, possibly even with pebbles and sugar cubes, their own rocks and boxes. The amount of possibilities this creates are endless. 

A few years back I took an Art in Education seminar. A dance teacher used Roxaboxen as our main focus of the lesson. We were split into different teams, each given a few cardboard boxes and balls for our rocks and boxes. We collaborated as a team to define our community values then created a dance with our boxes and balls to reflect these values we had chosen. It was beautiful. 

Roxaboxen can lead to many powerful conversations and lessons down the road, but ultimately, I believe it is the perfect book to spark the imagination as a child. I can see my friends and me now, hearing that story in our early elementary days and running with it. We would have run out to recess with ideas swirling in our minds of the communities we were about to create. It’s unfortunate that I never had the exposure to this picture book to place those imaginative ideas in my mind. 

Please, do your students a favor, regardless of their age, and tell them the great story of Roxaboxen. 

Have you read your students Roxaboxen? What discussions or activities did you use? Most importantly- How has Roxaboxen influenced you as a person and a teacher?