Here is a great app that shows the growth of plants from seed to garden!
There is also a read-to-me option that helps explain what is happening to the seeds as they grow. We are using this as a follow up to what was already taught in class about the seed cycle and plant growth.
Following our lesson on Georgia O'keefe and sketching flowers we taught the kids how to create Scratch Art of a flower. Scratch Art is basically an etching. You "scratch" away the top layer to reveal the colored layer underneath. This video is great to show students before they actually create their own scratch art.
After the video, we modeled
the following steps:
1. On a 3 x 3 inch sheet of white paper,
create blocks of color using crayons.
Press hard so the colors are nice
and bright. There should be no
white spaces visible.
2. Take a black crayon and create a "blanket" by completely covering the color blocking. The entire paper will be black with very little color showing through.
3. Using a variety of "tools" students
scratch/etch a drawing of a large flower. We let the students choose which tools they wanted to try (toothpicks, chopsticks, popsicle sticks and paper clips).
This is how they looked displayed all together (5 classes of students) in our school library!
Spring is in the air and flowers are blooming everywhere including our classroom!
We just started our study on plants and wanted to integrate it with art. We decided to use the art of Georgia O'keefe as our inspiration and focused on the use of positive/negative space, large scale drawings and shapes. We first discussed the work of Georgia O'keefe using the Smart Board and then watched two step-by-step flower drawing tutorials. The students sketched a daisy and/or a carnation in their art journals in pencil and then traced over it with a black marker. We were working on taking up as much positive space on the page as possible.
Here are some pages from the Smart Board Notebook file we used.
