I tend to feel less guilty about taking instructional time to do arts-type projects with my students when I am able to incorporate a few academic skills or learning experiences. I worked closely with our Computer teacher to help teach my students how to locate clip art, resize pictures, create text boxes, and make bulleted lists. Using all of these features, I had my students choose three holiday-themed images to use in their ornament. They picked three images, cropped them, and added them to the typed list.
Many of the teachers stuck with a "recycled" or "Earth friendly" theme with their ornaments. I decided to use little plastic dressing containers (that would be thrown away normally) to fill with white rice. My students worked on cutting out there images to add to the container of rice. We packed each one nice and tightly before gluing on the lids. Ribbon was added to the lids so that they could be hung on a tree. I also attached the laminated lists that the students worked on in Computer class. Students had a blast shaking the ornaments to locate the items in each one. I hope that the parents truly enjoy them and keep them for a very long time!
See the pictures below to see how our "I SPY" ornaments turned out!
Permission has been granted for the usage of student photo.
