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!