Starting to Think of Summer Days Spent in the Garden

It's spring! Like, all-the-way-really-truly spring around here.  To help bring on nice weather, first grade and kindergarten artists made some beautiful gardens:

A group of first grade flower/butterfly gardens.

Kindergarten garden with snake.

I thought I'd blogged about the first grade gardens before, but can't seem to find the post . . . my brain's pretty overloaded this time of year (Jesus help me if I need to remember anything like my debit pin number or my own children's names the last month or so of the school year).  Anyway, first graders used 6 x 18" blue background papers for the sky and 4 x 18" green papers to make the grass.  They then used construction paper to make flowers and colored butterflies (it's a photocopy of four butterflies that I've had for like, a million years):

I only let them cut out one butterfly at a time, color the back (symmetrically, of course) and glue them on one at a time ('cause I don't like lost/confused butterflies).  They glue only the body with the wings folded up:

The kindergarten lesson is one I got from Arts & Activities issue March 2006 (thank you Mary McNamara Mulkey from Sumner, Washington, I use this lesson a lot).  Kindergartners draw along with me making flowers using ONE color of marker, then color in and draw some ladybugs.  

Because my first graders can't accordion fold, I added a pattern snake this year (we used 2 x 24" paper):

And one last close-up of a nicely colored flower: