Texture Monster Building Fun

As promised, here is a post about my latest second grade lesson.  

For the past several years, I've started second grade out by talking about texture.  We write this definition in our sketchbooks: texture is the way something feels or looks like it would feel.  This year, after defining texture and drawing as many things as we could think of that have texture in our sketchbooks, we spent the next class period fingerpainting.  I have this huge box of donated paper that feels like fingerpaint paper to me, so that's what we use.  I was in my first-weeks-of-school-how-do-I-even-function funk at that point, so there's no photos of this step (plus the whole one adult/25 fingerpainting second graders thing).  My fingerpainting expectations are these--one paint hand, one clean hand.  And 3-4 paper towels per student.  I put a blob of paint on the middle of their paper, remind them "one paint hand, one clean hand" and move to the next student.  Students paint away with one hand, wipe their hand as clean as they can with the paper towels when finished then wash their hands while I put their papers in the drying rack.
The following class period I gave them back their dry paintings and had them feel the bumpy texture and cut the white off.  These blobs are the bodies of their texture monsters.  I got out the scrap box and random papers and demonstrated different ways to make texture with paper.  We talked about how monsters aren't real, so anything goes as long as it had texture.  When I turned them loose to work on their own I got this wonderfulness:

So scaly and pokey!

 So we spent a few days working on our monsters, and the final work day, we added speech bubbles:

And then I hung them in the hall.  I love that they're all so completely different and unique.  So adorable and wonderful!  SO hard to hang on that little tack strip:

Speaking of the halls, I also hung up some color-mixing clowns that first grade did:

So much fun!  Every school needs more kid paintings!