Fall Leaves and Firetrucks

If you teach, you understand that August and September are a very dizzying blur filled with excitement, to-do lists, and a little bit of nausea. The first few weeks of school are a swirl of lesson planning and acclimating to new classes and new goals! While I haven't had much time to capture pictures of all of our projects so far, I did (somehow) remember to snap a few of the most recent themes we've taught in our 4-year old classes. We have done 5 themes so far, including "Leaves and Trees" and "Fire Safety"; below are some art projects I did in my class that worked out very well. I had fun planning them, and the kids had even more fun putting them into action!

My favorite project from "Leaves and Trees" was when we made a tree using a "leaf painting" technique. For this project the kids had to trace their tree using a stencil (unfortunately most of them thought it was a mushroom, but come on-- they're four! I wanted to make the tracing and cutting simple.) After they cut out their tree they used brushes that had been fitted with faux leaves to paint their trees yellow, orange, and red.

Here are the brushes (I just attached the leaves with masking tape, and then threw them out after class):

My two favorite projects from "Fire Safety" were the firetruck we made, as well as the fire hose.

For the firetruck, the kids had to trace their truck and cut it out. We used bottle caps (from soda and water bottles) for the wheels, I cut and drew ladders beforehand, and they used large flat sequins for the lights. After all that they drew a window on the front of the truck.

For the fire hose (and this was a VERY fun project), we used toilet paper rolls, crepe streamers, scrap fabric, and duct tape! To start, the kids stuck small pieces of duct tape all over their TP rolls to make the nozzle. Then I had squares of red fabric for each hose; I helped them wrap long pieces of duct tape over the fabric to attach it to the nozzle. Last, they glued scraps of blue crepe streamers inside the other end of the nozzle to look like water spraying out. They loved, LOVED "spraying" their fire hoses all over the room to put out imaginary fires.

Hopefully these ideas are helpful additions to your Fall curriculum-- happy teaching!