All You Need is Paper (and a little love) ESL/EFL activities

Here's one more craft I did with my 4th-graders. They dipped their fingers in paint to make the little bunnies or eggs. We did the paint one day and the next day after the paint was completely dry, they added the details and wrote "Happy Easter"!  We folded half of a craft paper in half so it could stand up on a table. I had told them they could use it to decorate their houses for the holiday. This was fast and easy.  

 Every time my first-graders finish a unit, I send all their work home from that unit along with a progress report in a big brown envelope. I usually glue some activity they did on the cover of the envelope but this time I decided to do something different. Since we're studying parts of a house and cities, I had them use different colors of paint on a square sponge to stamp their envelope creating houses and buildings on which they later added windows, doors and other details. I also had them write the sentence, I live in Brasilia. I believe I'll keep doing something like this in the future, so they have one more activity to show their families.

My first-graders have been talking about what they can and can't do. I had them decorate these paper wings I cut out.  I added a paper loop on the back of each wing so they could fit their hands in. In one class they glued sequins and fingerpainted the wings with different colors. The following class, they "flew" around the classroom as they repeated I can fly. They couldn't wait to take the wings home to fly around the house. 😀  

Took my 5-year-olds outside to find leaves to use as stamps to make forests. We were studying nature and of course the topic of trees came up. Back in the classroom with their chosen leaves of different sizes, we used yellow and blue paint to create our forest green. Some leaves we first painted yellow, stamped white paper, and then painted the leaves blue and stamped the same yellow prints. The other leaves we first painted blue and then yellow. The kids were curious about how the tones of green were somewhat different depending on what color we used first. We saved the leaves and each day observed as they hardened because of the dry paint and then withered away. They used crayons to draw and color the forest floor. Each part of this activity was exciting and created wonder.  

  LOVED how these sunflowers turned out! My fifth graders were studying about how harmless things can become harmful and they read a text about sunflowers taking over a park. We used the scraping paint technique to make the background for the flowers and I asked them to use only black and white to draw the flowers so they would stand out. On another piece of paper, they had to write about the plants they had in or around their house. They then glued it on the back of the sunflower paper. We will most likely make a book with all the work they have been creating. Viva colors!

Students made a jungle with a sleepy snake in a tree to illustrate a trip to the jungle with their families. We used pieces of a thin cardboard from food boxes as tree trunks and different shades of crepe paper for the tree leaves. They finger painted the trunks and and the jungle and wrote a trip to the jungle on their work after everything had dried. I gave them the snake already cut out of red paper so they just had to add the details they wanted and glue it wherever they believed a snake would like to be in the jungle. I don't think many of them have ever been to the jungle with their families but who knows, maybe they will one day.   

Children are often ecstatic to celebrate their birthdays, and what better way to do so than with a delicious cake! Recently, my second-graders and I explored the idea of celebrating birthdays with family by creating smeared paint cakes. To make these cakes, I provided each student with a piece of craft paper onto which I added drops and lines of various colors of paint. The kids used a piece of cardboard to smear the paint and create a beautiful effect. Although a squeegee would have been ideal for this activity, I unfortunately did not have one on hand. During the following class, the students were asked to add their age number of candles to the cake, write "I celebrate my birthday," and add additional details using a black marker. The resulting artwork was truly interesting, and there were many gasps of awe and appreciation as we admired each smeared paint cake. The artwork was later used as the cover of the students' portfolios, which they will soon take home to share ...

I did this actvity with my advanced teens group. In one class they had to choose some colors and squirt paint onto a white piece of paper 3 times and fold the paper in the middle so the paint would create different patterns like in a mirror. I didn't tell them what it would be for. I also told them not to write their names on the paper. The mystery made the actvity even more engaging.  The following class I handed the papers out randomly, asking them to hand back the paper if it was their own. Next, they had to use vocabulary words we were studying to write sentences about the person who had made the images. I asked them to imagine they were studying the student's personality through the "painting" they had created.  They had to really use their creativity and also make sure they understood the meanings of each new word they used. They all had fun trying to come up with their sentences and then trying to find out who the paper belonged to. Last, when students got thei...

  For my third-graders to illustrate a story, we made finger-painted sheep. They first used white paint to make the sheep, and while the paint was drying, they wrote what happened first, next, then, and finally in the story. We came up with the sequence together as a group. I wrote their ideas on the board for them to copy on notebook paper. When they were done, they drew the head and legs of the sheep on black paper, cut them out, and glued them to the bodies. They also glued googly eyes onto the head. One other thing some students did was to add a small slip of folded paper on the back of the head, so it would stick out a little. I always love the fact that each one comes out different, even though the idea is the same. In the following class, they each used their work to practice reading.