Teaching Cursive Writing Strokes with Watercolor Paint

Learning should be fun, but when you're teaching cursive writing, it can be a challenge to make learning cursive writing fun. Today, we threw in a bit of art (shame on all you administrators for taking it out of classrooms) and we learned how to write cursive letter strokes using watercolors.

A student will make more fluid natural strokes using a paintbrush, so this is a super way to connect watercolor painting and cursive writing.

We started with the basic cursive writing strokes: undercurve, downcurve, overcurve, slant, and connector.

 

Using a paintbrush, it's easy to work with moving the brush and holding the brush in the right way to make the strokes.

The kiddos used different color paints and practiced their strokes across the sheet of paper. Oh, did I mention that they had fun learning cursive too? Art belongs in the classroom. It's a super teaching tool.

Thanks for stopping by,
Robin Sellers @ Sweet Tea Classroom

Pumpkin Art Kids: Kids Pumpkin Painting

It's that time of the year. While the pumpkins fill the fields and even street corners, go ahead and create some pumpkin art for kids to adorn your classroom and homeschool walls. Here's a super sweet and fun pumpkin painting technique for kids for you from Sweet Tea Classroom.

First, draw two lines across the paper. Think of making an X. The lines should intersect, but they can do this anywhere on the paper. The lines can be straight, curvy, or even zigzag lines.

Then draw a shape for the pumpkin on one of the corners. You can have either a landscape or vertical picture, but the pumpkin needs to be in  a corner. Then draw a few curved lines on the pumpkin and add a stem.

 Next, break out the paints. Use only three colors: red, yellow, and black or green. All colors in the pumpkin painting need to be mixed from these colors.

Start painting. Each section of the pumpkin should be a different shade orange and each section formed by the lines should be a different color--white is fine too.

 You then should paint the black or green outlines on the painting. Follow the lines and pumpkin outline from earlier.

Then choose two of the colored sections and create a dark pattern on top of it.  Woo-hoo, you've done it. Enjoy your super sweet and easy pumpkin painting.

If you liked this art project, check out my art project with a science connection {HERE}

Integrate Fun: Cursive Writing and Art

In my last post, I shared how to introduce cursive writing. This post adds another technique you can use to prepare your kiddos for cursive writing. I love to integrate fun and this post adds even more fun to cursive writing. We integrated art and cursive and got some super results.

To get started writing in cursive, we wrote some cursive loopy letters (b, k, h, e, l, q, p , j, f) and the kiddos used markers to color in the loops. Some letters have loops that go up, some go down, and some have both.

This was good, easy fun.  Since we're working with loopy letters first, I asked the kiddos to use different colored markers and make a series of the cursive letter l across a sheet of plain white paper. Then I asked them to create more lines of loop styles across the page. We used the loopy letters in the works bike, hello, quiz, and fish as guides. Check out our work. Pretty fun, right?

cursive writing art

Remember that we're making art, not writing cursive letters, so the experience is fun. The results are super and worthy of displaying. I've found that the skinny Crayola markers work well for this too.

Next we tied in a concept that I wrote about in the last post. The letters in cursive words are connected. We got our yarn out again and matched it up with our loopy art to demonstrate how all these cursive writing loops were connected.

Cursive writing with children doesn't have to be a challenge. It can be a work of art! Please follow my blog by e-mail to catch the next post in this cursive writing series. Hint--it's about cursive, art, and .....fun!