Super Cute Earth Day Art!

With Earth Day coming up, I'm sure a lot of us are talking about the 3 R's with our classes! My student teacher led an adorable art activity that is getting a lot of oohs and ahhhs when people walk past in the hallway!

Here's what you need:

• coffee filters

• green and blue markers

• spray bottle with water

 Students color their entire coffee filter to look like the earth...plenty of green for the land and blue for the water. 

When they finish, they take the spray bottle and spray their coffee filter. We put the filters on chinet dinner size plates which worked out great. Soak the entire filter and you will start to see the colors bleed together. 


Let them dry overnight and mount on black construction paper for a beautiful work of art that is out of this world!

Each one is different and I just loved this little saying to go with the display. 


Later this week, I will be posting some pictures and information on how my class is planning and putting our Earth Day music video together.

Create an Awesome Presentation with Prezi!

Prezi is an outstanding website where you can create presentations live and on the web. Prezis are so much more interactive than PowerPoint and look much more up-to-date. You can zoom in on details or pan out to see the whole picture. It works awesome with the SmartBoard too!

Prezi is really easy to use, and that's why it's one of my favorite web 2.0 tools for teachers.

Here's a Prezi I did for our big Earth Day unit. It combines text, pictures, and video.



Here's another Prezi I found on the site for the life cycle of butterfly. It's VERY well done and the video included is awesome! (Edited to add: It's very well done....except for the misspelling of "caterpillar"!)

Life Cycle of a Butterfly on Prezi

Producing A Music Video -- Earth Day activity!

One of my favorite musicians of all time is Jack Johnson.

I have all of his songs on my iPod....and when I listen to them, I feel like I'm here:

They are easy, breezy, fun, laid back....perfect for spring and summer listening. Jack has a kid's CD called Jack Johnson and Friends: Sing a-longs from the movie Curious George. This album has a track called "The 3 Rs". A perfect selection for the upcoming Earth Day celebration!

So after we've talked about ways to "go green", and how to reduce, reuse and recycle....I play this song for them and we brainstorm how we are going to make our music video. Working in groups, students came up with actions, dance moves (they are pretty sweet!), and what things we wanted to teach the audience about going green. I filmed the students in front of a "green screen", did the magic on iMovie and *voila*!  We produced our very own music video! We played this for the whole school during lunch on Earth Day and all of the grades LOVED it!

You can view the video at my old website HERE. This site is no longer updated, I'm using my blog instead. My dog makes a special appearance at the end. :)

I will post details and step by step instructions of how I did the green screen effects another time.