Tall Tales- I Need My Monster

Today was our last day for the summer! And it was MONSTER day!!!! I read the students this fabulous book that I stumbled upon at Barnes and Noble (I went in for 1 thing and walked out with about 10! Has that ever happened to you?) called I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll.  It may be my new favorite book. The students really liked it and I even heard a few chuckles from the parents as I was reading it to the children.

I also had on hand a couple of other very cute monster books for the students to use as inspiration: There Was An Old Monster (uses the same rhyming pattern as There Was An Old Lady) and Go Away, Big Green Monster

Since this was the last day of our program, we pulled out all of our left over materials and put them out for the children to use and we encouraged them to go crazy!

Once activity was a paper plate monster.(Paper Plate Monsters- scroll to the bottom to see their examples). I bought green paper plates and they glued and glittered their way to some amazing monsters.

 
The next group made a monster out of Kleenex boxes. (Kleenex Box Monster) I had been asking the parents throughout the program to save their boxes and bring them in for this last project, so we had enough for everybody.

These turned out so cool! If I had room for storage, this would be a keeper for during the school year!

The children covered them with scrapbook paper, wrapping paper (Dollar Tree paper, cut into manageable-sized pieces) and then went to town decorating them. We had lots of Model Magic left over from our chameleon projects the first week of the program, so they had fun creating all kinds of teeth, horns, etc for their monsters.

And the last project of the day was a foam sheet monster. The children were given a 12 x 12 foam sheet. They created their monster by cutting, gluing, drawing, etc, onto the foam sheet.

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Tall Tales- Cave Baby

Today's book was Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson and all of our projects centered around cave art.

For our younger children, we did ink blot painting. I had liquid watercolors, eyedroppers and straws. I had the parents help the children drip the paint onto the paper and then the children used the straw to blow the paint around the page.

This was probably my favorite project today. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have taken a few of the paintings home to frame! I absolutely love the vibrant colors of the liquid watercolors! The children loved it, too, because many of them had never used this medium before.

The next age group did stencil paintings. They cut out shapes from manila paper. Some cut out their hand print (since we had been talking about cave paintings). Others got creative and cut out the letters for their names. They placed their stencils onto their papers and were then given paper plates with neon tempera on them. They used toothbrushes that I had bought at Dollar Tree (5 pack for $1) and splattered their papers with the neon colors.  When they had finished spattering their papers, they pulled off their stencils and they were left with the outline of their images.

The got creative about how they were getting the paint onto their paper.








This little girl decided that her hands were a work of art by themselves!







And our last activity of the day was creating cave paint with dirt. Cave Paint
I brought in potting soil and vegetable shortening. I gave the children a cup and a spoon. They added dirt and vegetable shortening to their cup and mixed it together. Once they had the consistency they liked, I added a little bit of paint (giving them a little variety in their color). I gave them a choice between black, white and brown. They mixed that up and then used paint brushes, spoons and some even used their fingers to paint their cave paintings onto their paper.

This was a hit!!!! Even the parents liked this one. None of the children had done an activity like this before, so they were fascinated by creating their paint out of dirt.

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