Christmas Wrap Up: Kindergarten Projects

Here are some of our finished kindergarten projects from before break.  Everyone did gingerbread houses, where we talked about drawing a house using shapes, as well as patterns.

The other project was a one-day project I did with 2 of the 3 kindergarten classes as a filler before break.  For this project, we drew Santa Claus, step-by-step, together.

Kindergarten Gingerbread Paintings

This lesson, so far, has been a "fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants" type of lesson!  I saw this gingerbread house project on Pinterest and since the Kindergartners are learning about the Gingerbread Man in class, I figured it would be a good project before Christmas break.  Last night, I worked for 1 1/2 hours creating a nice power point that included the history of the gingerbread house, review of the Gingerbread Man story and art connections (drawing a house with shapes).  It took me two tries to get the power point to save because for some reason, my computer was being stupid...I saved it, took my external hard drive to school, and thought everything was okay.

WRONG! I plugged my external in first thing in the morning and I couldn't find my power point!  I called my husband quickly before the kids arrived first period, asking him to send me any power points he could find on my computer related to gingerbread.  Nothing.  I don't know what happened to it!

So, I thought to myself, "I'm an art teacher.  Art teachers are supposed to be flexible. What to do?"

When the students were in and seated, I asked them what they knew about the Gingerbread Man (review from class..positive points!).  I told them about some of the history of gingerbread (popular in Germany because of the Brothers Grimm and Hansel and Gretel), and we talked about how to draw a house for the gingerbread man.

As the students told me how to draw a house using shapes, I drew one on the board.

Next, I had the students draw their own gingerbread house on brown construction paper.

Cut out...

I had the students glue their house to construction paper (they got to pick magenta, purple, light blue, red or teal for their background).

And paint the "frosting" and snowy ground with white paint.

Normally, for a project like this, I would have students trace a standard house shape, cut and glue.  Buuuuutttttttt, this year, I'm trying to let them make their own art and do less tracing of my art.  Most of their houses turned out pretty great!  A few made really tiny triangle roofs on top of their squares...I corrected them, but if they didn't fix it correctly, I let it be.  They'll understand when they're ready!

Next class, we will talk about patterns and we will paint gumdrop patterns and peppermint candy patterns on the houses.  We'll probably add some snow too!