Making a Valentine's Day basket at WBCL

I was given a sack full of Valentine's Day cards last spring break and wrestled with how to best use them in a project for this class. We have made and decorated Valentines cards several times out of a variety of materials and I know we could've done that again. Instead we chose to tear the cards in half separating the back from the front and converting the back into a basket by folding its edges of up and in and stapling it together. We used fun foam hearts for the ends and decorated them with artwork from the cards. Lastly we punched holes in the hearts and used a pipe cleaner to form the handle. This project took on a lot of participation from the parents and everyone seemed to be having a good time with it.

Blue horse collage for Chinese New Year

I was excited to see a few months ago that Eric Carle had a book about a blue horse and it was recommended as a resource for Chinese New Year. Luckily one of the parents has a copy of the book and was able to bring it for the class. Before class I did a drawing of the horse based on his book and ran off copies for the participants. I had them cut out the horse and then use several different colors of blue tissue paper to make a collage on the horse. The example had a different colored saddle blanket and we were able to find some striped tissue paper to use for the blanket. Some of them were able to make a 3-D mane and tail and others chose to keep their's flat. Lastly we mounted it on red construction paper as most of the examples I've seen use red for celebrations.