Saturday, January 19, 2013

More Murals

 I love making murals with my class that connect to our books. I've found it is a great, meaningful way to connect writing, art, math, and language activities to reading. It is usually an excellent way to support retelling, and it also, frankly, is just fun. Kids love making the murals and they love walking past their murals in the hallway. I like that it is a class project- we work together as a team to produce one picture. We can talk a lot about teamwork.

For The Snowy Day mural we painted with cotton balls. We were working on identifying the season, winter, as well as answering the question "When did the story take place?" The art project was a great way to reinforce the winter aspect and connect science and reading.



Then  each child made their own city scene. They were given four "buildings" and told to put them in order from longest to smallest (a math objective). After they'd illustrated their buildings we covered them in snow as well and added them to our mural.  After all, where does The Snowy Day take place? In the city. 
We made tear-art snowmen, which I will admit worked better in a gen ed classroom than with m y group this year. Usually what I love about tear-art snowmen is that they never end up looking the same and always look kid-made. My students had a tough time tearing the paper into circles though because of their fine motor skills, but the snowmen still turned out pretty cute. We added them to our mural in order from smallest to tallest as well.

I love our Snowy Day mural, but I also feel like I could have done so much more with it. There is so much potential here.

*Disclaimer, on snowy days in my childhood my mother would roll out butcher paper and encourage us to make snowy day murals. She still has one of them and it is amazing- we made scenes from The Snowy Day and copied the art work. I totally stole her idea. *

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