Check out our Cool Cats!

I really work with first graders on colors (primary, secondary, warm, cool) and this is a project I got from a teacher in my former district (Thanks, Judy!) before she retired:



I'm so cool!




Almost too cool for school over here.

 I apologize for not taking photos along the way, but it's been crazy busy around here (and I'm also the tiniest bit of lazy these days).  We start by drawing the cats together using black watercolor marker--I don't tell them what they're drawing to begin, I just have them copy me.  Draw a circle, and they draw it.  Add this curved line, now this straight line, etc.  They figure out it's a cat before we're done.  Then we talk about cool colors and choose them from our markers.  We use dark blue, light blue, dark green, light green and violet Mr. Sketch markers.

My name is Jack, and I'm one cool cat!

I'm AJ and I'm cool, too.

I have a bunch of finished examples because I've done this project so many times, so I put some finished cats up and we talk about coloring all the way, not leaving any white, and using ONLY cool colors.  It takes them about 2 class periods (or a little more) to color them all the way.

Don't be jealous of my boogie.

Heeeeyyy, what's up? I'm one cool cat!

When most of the class is done coloring, we talk about warm colors and make torn paper backgrounds for our cats.  We usually do these on manilla paper.  It's a good time to practice our gluing skills.  When our backgrounds are done, we cut and glue our cats and then add cool details like sunglasses and collars.  I use whatever I have on hand for the collars--this year it was shiny paper from some paper remenants I ordered.  (If you've never ordered paper remenants from supply houses, you totally should, you never know what sort of goodness will be in there!)  In the past it's been scraps of scratch-art paper or metallic paper.  No matter what, the students love it!

I'm sporting a cool hat on my cool head.

I'm Jake, and I'm the last cool cat on this blog post.

After this, first grade learns the importance of all the primary colors when one is taken away (hope I haven't spoiled a future post!)