Painting with Bubble Wrap

Long time no see...Long time no blog?

 It's been hard for me to post here lately and read anything kindergarten related because I just needed a break from school. I left my job of six years, which was a lot harder then I thought it would be. I need to be working closer to home and so right now I'm in between jobs.

It's been very nerve wracking because the county I want to work on has posted ZERO jobs in elementary ed for the past two months. I know this because I have been checking every day (multiple times) I know it is partly due to the fact that they are still going through transfers and all that jazz, but waiting is hard. It's hard to go through Target and see the sale on glue sticks and not buy any.

But anyway, I've been keeping myself busy at home cleaning out some areas of my house that desperately needed it and I was cleaning up my computer and found some pictures of things that I did over the spring with my students.

This is from Valentine's Day, but you could do this project anytime. Last year our art teacher, who we only see 3 times a year :( , did this more free form with the kids. I adapted it for hearts for a valentine measuring project, but you could really do any shape you wanted to.

1. Collect different sized bubble wrap (large bubbles, small bubbles, etc.) and cut them down to individual pieces for the kids. Roughly the size of a piece of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Tape the bubble wrap to the table.

2. Have the students paint the bubble wrap and then make a print. I let them switch for different colors and different sized bubbles.

3. Let the paper dry and then have them trace their shape on the back. Then they can cut it out their shape. I purposely gave students different sized hearts since this was going to be a measuring activity. (Look its differentiated!)

4. I had my students measure with nonstandard units. I ended up putting these on the bulletin board put I have no pictures of that. They glued them to a sentence frame that said "I used _____  cubes to measure my heart." Some of my more advanced students got to pick their unit of measurement so their frame looked like this " I used ____   _______ to measure my heart."

Thinking back now you could do this with a shapes unit so you could review 2D shapes (K.G.2) and have them use a paper big enough that they could trace two object and then compare (K.MD.2).