Hello to one and all!
These past couple of weeks have been super busy! We have been busy little bees!!! We've worked on several art projects and I tried my best to explain abstract art. The children used chalk and water in order to make the chalk stick/stay on the paper and not rub off. It really looks nice on construction paper. For the most part the kids understand the concept and made the wall look really nice! After that project we then went straight into our Mother's Day project that we had started a whole week before...just because it was going to be quite a bit of work. We started with a plain foam covered notebook and we worked on this "Memory Book" for mom diligently. I printed a very cute poem (English & Spanish) for the kids to add to the book. I also had them leave their hand print on the page next to the poem. Cute right? The little kids love it because they got to paint their hands. They also made an award for "best mom" that they then glued onto the book. We then got to the part that took us a couple of days. We did our best interpretation of a pop up card for mom. I used glittery foam paper and had the kids color flowers and I printed out something nice to go with the flowers. It was challenging getting 2nd and 3rd grade boys to get pumped up about coloring and talking about flowers but when the pop up idea popped into my brain, I thought this might just do the trick. Guess what, it did...the kids thought it was COOL!
One of the last things the kids added to the memory book was a picture and they had to make it look pretty with little letters and icons. Lastly I had them write a letter to mom explaining how much she means to them. We then took tissue paper and wrapped them up very carefully and added a pretty ribbon to finish them off. The kids said their moms loved them! This week we have been playing outside but since the weather warmed up so suddenly yesterday, we colored inside and wrote nice things to our troops using appreciation coloring pages. I decided it would be a nice idea to have them color the pages and then send them out in time for Memorial Day. The kids really enjoyed thanking our service men and woman! Some of them wrote, "you are cool!" Or "you are awesome!" I hope maybe more of the other after school sites would do the same! It's something small we can do for the troops overseas that can brighten up their day. It's pretty simple, you can go online and there are plenty of sites that are dedicated to sending coloring pages or messages from kids at schools to our troops over seas. Others websites send the drawings with care packages so when they get opened, they bring smiles to their faces! I hope other coordinators would be encouraged to do the same! Thanks everyone!!!
