Cassie Stephens: lesson on kindness

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

School-Wide Collaborative: Positive Four Letter Word to Describe Our School

Every year, I like to start my students with a school-wide collaborative. In fact, you can find a ton of our back to school collaboratives right here, just use that search bar! You can also see my third grader's school wide collaborative here.

To kick off the school year, on the third day of art, all of my first through fourth grade students began painting. I picked up packs of large paper shapes from IKEA on a recent trip. Any construction paper would work great though. The paper from IKEA was thin so it wasn't the best for painting. It did, however, give us a variety of shapes to paint on.

If you want to hear more about my painting setup and how I introduce painting to all of my students, you can check out this blog post. Here's the break down of the lesson (keep in mind, my classes are 30 minutes in length):

Day 1 and 2: Painting! We painted patterns all over our letters. My focus for those two days was introducing my painting procedures.

Day 3: Working together in table teams, the teams of four kids had to come up with a positive four letter word to describe our school. Each table team had a dry erase board and had to write down three things: what their word was, who was going to construct what letter and what color of paper they were going to use for the letter.

The letters were created from strips of paper. Students who finished early helped their teammates. Any tables that had fewer than four kids still had to create a four letter word...they just had the help of early finishers.

Day 4: Assemble the word! For this, the kids again worked in teams. They had to glue two long strips of cut posterboard together Then they laid out their words and glued it down. This only took a short amount of time. Once complete, they wrote about their chosen word!

If you are interested in doing this lesson and would like a free copy of this bunting, here you go!

To display, I stapled four triangles together to create a pattern bunting.

The bunting was then hung between the displays.

Because I didn't want their words to get lost on the boring wall colors, I cut out flags to go behind them. Yellow and blue are the colors of our school. Yes, that was time consuming but I really like the look. Also, the bunting and the integration of writing in my art room makes me so happy!

FOR FIRST GRADE: Okay, full disclosure, getting first graders (who are really still kindergarteners) to dream up a word and create it was gonna be super difficult. So, instead, I assigned each class a word that we voted and agreed on. One class did NICE while another did KIND. These were then hung by string in the hallway.

I was so impressed by the artists during this lesson. The words are now hung throughout our school. The message they send really makes me happy.

The kids dreamed up so many wonderful words. They did outline the letters in the opposite color of paint once complete.

I love the choice of SWAG. I also had one group come up with the word ZANY which I totally hung by the art room door!

If you do this lesson, I'd love to hear from you! I can think of some things I would change...but for now, they look lovely, especially for our upcoming Open House.

And it got all of the kids painting nearly right away!

This would be the perfect project to use up any scraps of paper too. Those papers could be used as the paper for the letter making or the background shapes.