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Art

How to Make Valentine’s Day Love Trees

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Create these adorable watercolour love trees for Valentine's Day, World Kindness Day, Earth Day or Pink Shirt Day. They make a great bulletin board and our post features step by step instructions for your elementary classroom. Come read the whole post.

Do you need a Valentine’s Day art project or activity that you can use to teach students about colour while making something special? Do you dread having to find something to do for Valentine’s Day? Are you a Valentine’s Day fool? Or Scrooge? It sounds like you need to learn how to make Valentine’s Day love trees!

There are several variations to make this Valentine’s Day-themed project listed below, but basically, it’s a tree with heart-shaped leaves. Sounds great, right? Who doesn’t need a heart-shaped leaf? So cute and easy to make! They are perfect for World Kindness Day or Pink Shirt Day too!

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Sweet and Simple Two-Colour Watercolour Candy Cane Paintings

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Candy canes painted by children.

We love to teach students new simple techniques for painting with watercolour. We created this Christmas art project that only uses two colours as a way to practice a technique where students remove paint from their page. This watercolour candy cane painting teaches students techniques like adding light and shadows.

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Five Easy Christmas Tree Projects for Leftover Bits and Pieces

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An easy Christmas tree art project made with rolled up leftover Christmas wrapping paper.
Rolled Christmas Wrapping Paper

If you’re like us (and most teachers), you likely have lots of bits and pieces left over from previous projects. We often have to buy a class set of things and always have one or two left over. The good news is that we have some projects that can use some of that up and still create awesome Christmas tree projects for your art class. Have your students gift them to their families. Come check out these Christmas tree projects.

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Five Ways to Use a Collaborative Poster

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Collaborative posters are much more than simply colouring. You can use them to teach, communicate, work together and have fun. Come learn different ways to use collaborative posters and justify the learning that can happen during the process.

We love creating collaborative posters. They are so much fun to make, but our students also love to create them. Of course, we have made over one hundred different designs and nobody is going to have the time to use them all. But, there’s more than one way to use a collaborative poster. Come learn some of the different ways you can use them (and spoiler alert–they aren’t more complicated and still don’t require much prep).

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Save Time With These Christmas Art Projects

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A collection of artwork created by students that features pictures of Santa, ornaments and candles.

Does your school ask you to create Christmas art to decorate the halls or gymnasium during the concert season? Over the years we’ve taught at schools with all-out Christmas concerts and others that were more secular in nature. However, the artwork requests have typically been the same. Some years we create Christmas art while others are just winter. Come learn a few of the fastest Christmas art projects you can get knocked out in just a few hours from start to finish.

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Remembrance Day Resources for Canadian Classrooms

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These resources for Remembrance Day are perfect for your upper elementary classroom in Canada.

Over the years we’ve organized so many Remembrance Day assemblies that we’ve lost track of everything we’ve done. That’s why it’s time to put together one post where all our Remembrance Day resources can be found in one place. Learn ways of observing Remembrance Day with some of the activities we have done in our schools over the years.

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Winter Art Projects That Will Warm Your Heart

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Organic winter trees painted with watercolour by students.

If you’re an elementary generalist, you probably have to teach your own art class. It can be tricky to find interesting art projects that don’t require a lot of special materials or skills. We have created a lot of different art projects over the years. Some of them have flopped. But, we’ve also come up with some favourites. Come read about some of the ways we help our students create beautiful works of art while teaching those valuable art outcomes through winter art projects.

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How to Have Snow Much Fun With These Snow Activities

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A drawing of a snowman with pastels.

When you live in a winter climate like northern Canada, the opportunities to do activities related to snow are endless. We try to build weather-related snow activities into our classes wherever possible. We teach in upper elementary, but we’ve used some of these activities with our younger buddies and some we’ve challenged ourselves. Come check out these snow activities that will keep you busy all winter.

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Recycle Old Art Projects 9 Fantastic Ways

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What do you do with old art projects that aren't really framing-worthy? There are lots of ways you can recycle and repurpose art in your classroom. This is a great way to get rid of practice work or those projects that just don't work out. Come read through these ideas and see what you can do in your upper elementary classroom today.

If you have a bunch of completed art projects or partially completed ones, we came up with a whole bunch of ways to recycle them into new things. Recycling art projects not only helps reduce waste but also encourages creativity and resourcefulness.

Before we recycle any piece of art, we encourage students to take a picture so it can be remembered but won’t take up space. This is so that students can see how they grow and change as artists as opposed to keeping it as a memory.

We hate wasting materials, so whenever possible, we recycle pieces of art projects and craft materials so they can be used again in the future. The last thing we want is for art projects to be thrown into the landfill. Sometimes we do art projects that are not meant for display because we are practicing skills. These are the ones we recycle first.

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9 Spectacular Art Projects For a Pen and Paper

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If you are looking for some very simple art projects you can do in your upper elementary classroom with just a pen and paper. We've included all the instructions so you can create these beautiful but very simple art projects for elementary students. Come take a look and find the one you'll save when you need something in a pinch.

Quick art projects using only pen and paper are essential for busy elementary teachers. This post is especially for those who don’t consider themselves “art people” or who face budget constraints, classroom size limits or material shortages. Unlike complex art lessons requiring setup time and specialty supplies, these 9 projects can be done in 15–30 minutes with just a black Sharpie and printer paper. They’re classroom-tested, prep-free, and guaranteed to work in any upper elementary (grades 3–6) setting. Continue reading to learn more.

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How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons

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Include Indigenous artists from across Canada in your art lessons.

Incorporating the stories and culture of Indigenous people is important to us. It’s woven throughout our subject areas, but we often look for other places to provide opportunities to bring cultures together. We’ve had several students who share their Cree and Dene cultures with us. Other years we’ve had no one in our classroom with a direct connection to our Indigenous People. We want all of our students to feel connected to the history of our country and the people who were here first. One way we do this is by exploring the works of Indigenous artists in Canada.

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Heart Art Projects You’ll Love

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Heart art projects are great any time of year. We collected some of our favourite art projects that use basic materials like markers, pastels and crayons and put all the instructions in one blog post. Come see which one you can make with your upper elementary class for Valentine's Day, Pink Shirt Day or just to show how kind your students can be.

We love to create art projects that use simple shapes but teach students different techniques. Heart art projects are perfect around Valentine’s Day, but they are a universal symbol that can be done any time of year. These art projects are some of the favourites that we use year after year. Best of all, they mostly use common materials you can find in most schools.

Check out these heart art projects that you can use to decorate your classroom, make gifts or share the love.

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