The Ultimate Invasive Species STEAM project

For our Grade 4 class STEAM project, the students learned about invasive species and then designed, built and named their own ultimate invasive species. 

Pour notre projet STEAM 4ème, les élèves ont découvert les espèces envahissantes et puis ont conçu, construit + nommé leur propre espèce envahissante ultime.

- Patrick

Leaf Identification Worksheets

I have just added a new resource to my TeachersPayTeachers site that I am excited about. My class had a great time using these this fall. These are worksheets that teach how to identify deciduous and coniferous trees based on the characteristics of leaves. These are cross-curricular worksheets that combines science, environment, art, language and outdoor activity. This resource works well with any age level. It works with the science curriculum, outdoor exploration, student inquiry project, visual arts and language.

- Patrick

Painted Rocks

Painted rocks is an easy and fun project that can be done with any age group- and just vary the expectations as the artists get more experienced.

Start by collecting rocks and cleaning them. Next, get the art supplies you will need:

Acrylic paint, brushes, water cups, reusable sheet.

Choose an idea for the project to develop expectations/criteria. We started with a simple idea: colours - and since we've been learning about Egypt lately-  ancient Egypt! We chose red and blue as our main colours and added gold for the Eye of Horus rock.

- Patrick

Ancient Egypt Projects - part 3

For the third edition of our social-distancing-based Ancient Egypt Projects, we decided to try to make a little sculpture of a falcon. Ours is inspired by some Ancient Egyptian artefacts, gold and turquoise falcon sculptures.

We started with pipe cleaners, masking tape and card stock base.

Then, we made a rough form of a falcon.

Next, we taped it in place and started to add masking tape to make it look more and more like a falcon. This type of sculpture involves adding on material to a frame. 

Keep adding tape until you are satisfied with how it looks. 

Now it is ready for paper mache. Just tear up some scrap paper, get some glue and water, and apply layers of the torn up paper dipped in the glue mixture with a paint brush. Cover the entire sculpture. 

Now it is ready to paint!

Here is our finished falcon. And we had so much fun, we made another one to try out different colours:

- Patrick

Ancient Egypt Art Projects!

Being stuck at home with my kid due to this COVID-19 craziness has been a great opportunity to explore new arts and crafts projects. Some of these would work well in the classroom and as enrichment projects for different grade levels (for example: art for JK, SK, GR1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Social Studies for Grade 4...).

This will be the first fo several Ancient Egypt-themed arts and crafts ideas. "Melty Beads" is a great concentration craft and has served us well as a calm-down activity. This required an iron, and a "melty bead" kit (available online to order- or in most arts/crafts stores).

We started our Ancient Egyptian Gods series with a design of Horus, the falcon-headed God of the Sky. We added a sun behind him and chose the colour red to symbolize his domain.

We then chose the kind, crocodile-headed God of the Nile: Sobek. This was a lot of fun to do, trying to fit in a design of a crocodile head within the confines of the bead template. We chose light blue to represent the Nile river behind Sobek, and greens to show the lush vegetation growing along the river.

A highlight of Ancient Egyptian culture, the sarcophagus, was a natural choice for another image. We noticed that Ancient Egyptians used a lot of stripe patterns in their work, so we added some ours.

Then we did an image of Bastet, the cat Goddess of the home and fertility. We added the Great Pyramids as a pattern at the bottom as well.

Lots of fun, and a great calm-down activity that keeps kids enjoying concentrating, working with colour, pattern and creative expression and building fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination- as well as enhancing their interest in Ancient Egyptian culture.

- Patrick