City Street Art and Bugs

You will probably get sick of seeing these four kids from my little Friday class, but maybe not, because they are so cute. Our art project this day was drawing buildings and cityscapes on the backs of empty cardboard food boxes. I found this great idea at one of my favorite blogs: Creative Jewish Mom. (Her blog is also a great resource for crochet projects.)

I printed out a few buildings and city reference pictures for the kids and encouraged them to notice and use architectural details. This project would be a nice introduction or companion lesson for a unit on architecture styles. You could do one a week of classic styles for a series. We took a more relaxed approach and just did free drawing.

We used black permanent markers and filled in with colored markers. We combined our boxes into a whole block of buildings. We even had a doghouse (toothpick box) and an empty lot with grass and a tree. It helped to show them an example of what would be folded away when the boxes were reassembled. I tried gluing the boxes together, but I think taping with masking tape or packing tape might work well to re-assemble. I forgot my masking tape so we made do with clear tape.

The same week in our entomology class, we made bugs out of pipe cleaners, pom poms and google eyes. They were supposed to be centipedes and millipedes, but an arachnid snuck in there too. I like to have a simple craft on the weeks when we have lots of reading aloud to do. Their hands can be busy while their minds are listening. W's bugs are the spider and the three on his left. The pipe cleaner worms were two pipe cleaners twisted together and wrapped around a pencil, then pulled a little looser. Glue on some eyes and have fun schooching them around the room. We glued a few pom poms onto clothes pins so those bugs could hang on to things. You could also glue a magnet onto the back of the clothes pins so they could hang out on your fridge.