Christmas Presents (I know, really late post...)

Materials:

- Box Tracers

- Rulers

- Pencils

- Colored Pencils

- Scissors

- Construction Paper

- Paint

- Paintbrushes

- Toothbrushes

- Black Markers

I wanted to teach my students a simple way to make a cube or rectangular prism. With Christmas coming up, I thought making them into presents would be a good practice.

1. I had students use squares or rectangles as tracers to begin. 

2. Next I told them to, "Pick a corner, any corner." They slid their tracer in the direction of that corner, and then traced just that corner.

3. Last would be to connect those three corners!

Now of course I had the students decorate their presents, but I thought it would be nice to set them under a Christmas tree. My plan was:

1. Draw a half oval onto a piece of construction paper for a tree skirt and decorate.

2. To make the tree, we painted one stripe brown and added some white for shading. This would be the trunk. 

3. Last, I showed how to use a toothbrush to make the branches of their tree. 

In my head I thought we'd cut these all out and glue them onto one nice collage. But... some of the students, well most of them, made the presents so large (they were getting really excited about receiving X Boxes and Laptops (laptops?!, whoa! what happened to some Barbies? can I do a parenthesis in a parenthesis?)) that they kind of took over our trees.. so you really can't see them. I didn't take into account that students would slide their tracers over from step two so far to make such large presents! 

Oh well, you live and you learn. So for one class we made the trees and in another I just had them glue their presents onto a piece of paper because, really, the highlight of the project were their wonderful cubes!

Pin It