I had another awesome day at Fishtown Recreation Center this week! We started off with a reading of the popular children’s book “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein, which served as the theme for our first art activity. The children really enjoyed the book, and were very engaged. One of the children recognized the cover and very excitedly told us that he had the same book at home!
Then, we used brown paper bags with cuts on them to make Giving Trees. In this activity, the children were instructed to put their hand inside the bag to flatten out the base, and then twist the slits on the bag to make the branches (example shown in the first picture, look at how proud he is of his awesome tree!).
Next, we used glue and cut-up tissue paper to glue on the “leaves and apples” onto their trees. The outcome of everyone’s trees were was amazing and I was very glad to see how happy the children were with their colorful trees.
We then moved onto making butterflies. We had pre-made butterflies made out of pipe cleaner and thin brown paper, and we asked the children to color the butterfly with markers. Afterwards, we sprayed the colorful butterflies with water, and the colors beautifully melted into each other! The children were very impressed and it was so great to see their facial expressions when they saw the transitioning of the colors.
I had lots of fun assistant teaching this week, and I can’t wait for next week!