Spring is here! Spring is here! Can anyone else tell my excitement? Well, if not, let me explain. I am so excited Spring is here! Winter in Texas is crazy. One day it will be 80 degrees and the next it will be 30 degrees. I either am sneezing like crazy (allergies are awesome) or I look like a tourist from Hawaii visiting Alaska.
Anyways, to celebrate Spring and all of it's glory, we did a Flower Garden in class. I love these because each of the student's is so unique and beautiful in there own way. We also used the flower garden as an opportunity to talk/ review our five senses. We used the book "The Flower Garden" by Eve Bunting.
After reading the book, we talked about the different settings in the story (city, flower shop, apartment). Then I told students that they were going to make their own flower garden! They were so excited! Here is how we did it:
Each student was given one white sheet of paper, one blue sheet of paper, a half sheet of green and a half sheet of brown.
Here is what they did:
- They used the half sheet of brown paper to create a flower box. Once it was cut to size they glued it to the bottom of their blue paper. I did mine portrait and instructed them to do the same, but, well, you know how that goes.
- The next step was to draw their flowers on the white paper. I drew a few on the board (tulip, daisy) but I told them to be creative. They could draw any flower they wanted! But I reminded them that they were going to cut them out after a few more steps, so to be mindful of how many petals they draw.
- Before we cut out the flowers, we cut out our stems and leaves. I reminded them that each flower they drew had to have a stem. Once they cut the stems out they glued them on to their blue paper, coming out of the flower box.
Our Flower Garden was done!
Now for the five senses...
Over the next few days we would take picture walks through the book "The Flower Garden." We talked about the different senses in different pages. What could you see in a flower garden? What are things you could hear in a flower garden? Etc. etc. We took all of the (good) ideas and put them in a chart.
We referred to this chart during the entire week long lesson, so you might want to create it on chart paper or smaller if you have a document camera, this way you can refer back to it time and time again.
I used sheets of manila paper and cut them up in to fourths. We used the little sheets to draw something from each sense. I broke this part down in to 5 days (a sense a day), but feel free to do it how you want.
After all the pictures were drawn, colored, cut and glued, we wrote about what we saw in our flower garden.
Here are some examples of the students' work. Gorgeous!
To do this in your classroom and use the "In My Flower Garden ..." senses sheet, grab it in my store for $1.00. Enjoy!
