This year for teacher appreciation week, I came up with a fun-food-themed card. Based on whether the teacher had a sweet tooth (thanks to you we're smart cookies!) or a spicy preference (taco 'bout a great teacher), each student made a card, and I wrapped it up the stack of cards in ribbon, put it with either cookies or a taco spice packet as a surprise for the teacher. This was really fun and the kids did a pretty good job giving their food a face....And as an added bonus, we were working on the taco cards on Cinco de Mayo!

Students glued a strip inside the card and wrote the teacher's name and signed their own name. It was a great chance for them to add a special note or drawing too!

Here is the 'Thanks to You.....We're Smart Cookies' printable.

Here is the 'Taco 'bout a great teacher' printable.

For the cookie cards, students cut the corners of a 4X4 square to make it round. For the taco, we used a 4X6 yellow rectangle and trimmed off only the top two corners. We colored these cards using crayola color sticks, but crayons or markers would've been great too. I liked the color sticks because they were not messy and we had a chance to use 'colored pencils' without all the sharpening!

A few of my older students drew cookies with milk and some even drew a smart looking cookie monster with glasses.

How adorable is this illustration!!? Definitely inspired many of my students' cookies.

How awesome is this cookies and milk shirt from threadless?!

Love this illustration!

Okay, so I KNOW that handmade cards are very, very special. I have a whole scrapbook of cards that have been made by friends and students. I cherish handmade things.

However, I really wanted to do one more big technology project this semester with my 2nd-4th grade students. I found this free app, Red Stamp and decided to use it for Mother's Day cards.

With the digital age, most parents don't have many printed photos of their children, no one prints cell phone selfies.

Another big TECH feature of this project, is that I used Reflector on iMac to make a screen cast of my iPad. I recorded myself using the app via Quicktime, uploaded the video into iMovie, and added a narration. Once I was happy with my narration, I added some music, put in a few titles and transitions and exported the movie to Youtube. I've been 'flipping' all week, using the video to demonstrate how to use the app, which allows me to work more one-on-one with the students and I have a QR code displayed for easy access if anyone forgets how to do the project, they can re-watch the video.

Here is the link to my video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80bI0Kr1_94

Now my students who are gone on a field trip can preview the movie before their art-make-up-session and come in for a QUICK little work session and the instructional input can be done before they get here. Perfect solution for trying to squeeze them in before Mother's Day so they don't miss out on this project.
 
To finish, I uploaded the cards to Dropbox, imported them onto my laptop and printed them in color. I also mounted them on construction paper and laminated them. The cards could also be emailed to parents, but I think these will be very special keepsakes for years to come!

(Sorry for the bad pic, I wanted to share the idea but keep my students anonymous. I'm posting a couple of ones I designed as examples too, but the student-made ones are much better!)

Supplies:
Pencil
glue
construction paper
chalk

1st-4th grade
(The 1st grade ones were really messy....)

Ah Easter. I love bunny projects, but sometimes its hard to get the older boys on board....this year, I gave my students several images of bunnies (you can see my pinterest Easter board to get an idea of what I sketched out). I let them select a bunny pose that they liked based on some sketches that I had posted on the board. I let them make up their own bunnies too.

The first week, we drew the bunny (don't use SUPER small details, and make the bunny LARGE) with pencil on construction paper. I had pink, dark gray, pastel green and pastel blue. The dark gray looked the best, and black would've been better, but I'm almost out of black for the year. Then we squirted glue over top of the pencil lines.


Week 2
Once the glue is dry, we colored the bunnies with chalk. This was very messy. I didn't give them any restrictions with this, I just said that they had to color the entire paper, and a pattern for the background would be good. Also, since my drying wrack is tilted, some of the glue ran so they had to be creative about covering the runs. And I reminded them that the chalk is very dusty, so don't blow it around...and be careful not to smear one part while you are coloring another. If they were doing a white bunny, they had to be careful not to finger print the white. I showed them some examples of ones that were ruined by fingerprints.

A 2nd grader came up with the idea of doing eggs along the edge...and a 3rd grader made up the ninja bunny below.