Materials
- large sheets of paper
- thumbtacks
- paintbrushes
- tempera paint in various colors
- sidewalk chalk in various colors
- spray bottles filled with water
- glue
- nature items
- construction paper
- pompoms, rickrack, and other scrap materials
- old toothbrushes
What to do
1. On a nice day, go outside and hang painting paper on trees using thumbtacks. Provide paintbrushes and different colors of paint and encourage the children to look around and paint what they see in nature. Encourage them to talk about their paintings.
2. Have a sidewalk chalk party! Talk about how the chalk colors are “pastel.” Encourage the children to draw chalk pictures on the concrete. Give them spray bottles full of water and let them “erase” their pictures and start again.
3. Take a nature walk and ask the children to collect leaves, nuts, twigs, and so on. Encourage the children to make nature pictures by gluing their finds to construction paper. Let them decorate the pictures by gluing rickrack and pompoms to the paper and splattering paint on with an old toothbrush.
-Lisa Chichester, Parkersburg, WV
Instructions
1. Make different
habitats using
shoeboxes. Paint the
inside of shoeboxes to
match each type of
habitat, such as
arctic, prairie,
jungle, and farm.
2. Draw, paint, or use
felt cutouts to decorate
the habitats. For example, for a
jungle habitat, use brown and
green felt for a tree, blue for water
lines, and light blue for a cloud or the sky. For a farm habitation, use red felt
for a barn, white for a house, and green for grass.
3. Collect pictures of animals or small rubber animals and place them on a tray.
4. Encourage the children to sort the animals according to their habitat. They
can place the animals in the appropriate shoebox.
