Ninja Notes

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Upcycled Art Lessons

Five Easy Christmas Tree Projects for Leftover Bits and Pieces

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Do you have lots of odds and ends leftover from various Christmas art porjects and crafts over the years? Here are five projects to help use them up. Come find the free art project instructions and get some new ideas for your upper elementary students. These make great gifts or decorations during the festive season.
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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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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Easy to Use Classroom Activities for Earth Day

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Are you looking for activities to do with your upper elementary class? We pulled together Earth Day themed lessons and activities (but they can be used any time of year) for your upper elementary classroom. Come check out the resources, books, and ideas to use right away.

Every day in our classroom is Earth Day. It’s part of our science lessons to learn about energy conservation, so it’s easy to make sure we talk about the importance of conservation regularly.

One year a fellow teacher thought it would be a great idea to print a little paper globe for each student in our school (that’s several hundred) and write a “thank you to the Earth” type sentence.

I don’t often speak up at meetings, but I couldn’t resist this one. Isn’t it counterproductive to teach students about conservation by wasting all that paper?

Everyone agreed, but NO ONE had any suggestions on what we could do instead. And that’s how we came up with this list of Earth Day activities (and why you should try some of them).

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