Geese and Swans and Hens…Oh My!

There is time for one last blog post this calendar year. (And in related news, how did 2022 race by so quickly?) This is a Christmas blog post--but if you aren’t celebrating Christmas, please stick around because I think you’ll like this post.

I teach art at a Kinder-eighth private school. We always do Christmas art and this year I have a specific theme. Each class illustrated a different part of the song “Twelve Days of Christmas.” We took a few shortcuts in that some classes colored in coloring sheets rather than making original art. But hey, that’s still creative…

We are starting with the eleventh verse, followed by the twelfth, which might be unconventional, but we had too much cute art to only do one verse. I’m not making you sit through all twelve verses—you’re busy!

** Turn your sound on so that you hear the music in the video! Click on the video below: 

The video goes by quickly, so here are some photos of what the kiddos made:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave me to me…

twelve lords a leaping…

8th grade

eleven ladies dancing…

8th grade

ten pipers piping…

7th grade

nine drummers drumming…

Amazing detail from one of my super talented 7th graders.

eight maids a milking…

6th grade

6th grade

seven swans a swimming…

6th grade

six geese a laying…

2nd grade

five gold rings!

Kindergarten

Kindergartener solving a problem--too many rings?
Cross one out!

four calling birds…

1st grade

three French hens…

5th grade

two turtle doves…

3rd grade

and a partridge in a pear tree!

4th grade--adorable!

4th grade--tackling challenging subject matter!

4th grade--obviously, the partridge needs a swing!

4th grade--fabulous detail...

4th grade--super creative from one of my imaginative students...

4th grade awesome artist

4th grade--love all this texture!

Thanks for reading my blog posts this year. I love to share fun art and make people laugh, and I hope you enjoyed everything.

Have a cozy and safe new year and I will see you right back here in 2023.

Thankful for Creativity

Oh, man, the countdown has begun. Halloween is behind us, which means that we have been making Thanksgiving artwork, and yet I feel pressured to make sure we do Christmas art soon and the days are flying by and the Christmas decorations are up in Target and the days are shorter and help! Vanna White, I don’t need a vowel, but I would like to buy another two weeks…

Okay, deep breaths. Let’s focus on the magic of Thanksgiving.

Here’s what my wiggly students made this month:

Kindergarten colored cornucopia. They started a brief debate about whether apples could be blue, and then we turned their art into cards. How cheerful are these?

First grade also colored cornucopia, turning them into cards. I like the creative details they added.

My second-grade students decorated wreaths with a fall vibe and color scheme. I like how some kids drew texture onto the leaves.  

Third grade cut feathers from construction paper and turned pinecones into three-dimensional turkeys.   

One creative kiddo colored both sides: business in the front, and party in the back.

Please enjoy a short break from art with a round of Turkey Trivia.

How many feathers does an adult turkey have? (5,000-6,000.)

What is a group of turkeys called? (A rafter or a flock.)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled art program. Fourth grade art led me to an epiphany: doing a messy art project with nine-year-olds is…not relaxing. I thought it would be manageable to paint fall leaves with them, because I reasoned, “What could go wrong? These will look great. Painting is fun. Plus, there are only 39 kids. Well, 36, since three are absent.” Fast forward a few minutes and I realized that this was going to be a challenging hour. There was more water on the ground than in the Sea World splash zone. But somehow we got through it and when the tables were dry--much later--we had some beautiful fall leaves for our Thanksgiving cards. 

My fifth-grade artists made turkey table toppers for Thanksgiving. There is so much variety in how these turned out, don't you think?

 

My students love it when I bring trivia into our art lessons, and they had wildly differing ideas about how fast a turkey can run.

Believe it or not, a turkey can run up to 25 miles per hour.

Fun fact: turkeys sleep in trees!

Did you know that if a turkey feels strong emotion, its head can change color? Their heads range in color from red to blue to white.

Sixth and eighth grades didn’t have art before Thanksgiving, due to parent-teacher conferences, but rest assured you will see some spirited art from them next month.

Seventh grade colored and folded paper to create cheerful fall leaves, which we attached to cards they could give to family or friends. Usually, I design my own projects but I found this one online by Ju Lee. It’s fun and beautiful and hey, sometimes we need the occasional short cut by using a project someone else designed. I think it’s a bit like another Thanksgiving shortcut. You could get up at three in the morning on Thanksgiving to make stuffing from scratch, or you could wake up at a reasonable hour and make Stove Top. Bottom line, everyone is fed. And the art still looks great.

Thanks for checking out my students’ art, and from my home to yours, Happy Thanksgiving!