Spring Art Integration Lessons!

Spring is in the air…and aren’t we all so glad! I have to admit, I live in Arizona, so I’ve had beautiful weather for a while (don’t shoot me), but most of my friends and family live in the East and I know it’s been a hard, grueling winter and I’ve lived in KY, MD, and VA and I know how wonderful the warm air of spring feels after a long, cold winter.

For spring, I have three resources that my students love to use and classroom teachers love to integrate into their lessons to inject some art  into their days! Great for classroom teachers are my interactive and pattern-filled coloring sheets for spring and Easter, my group collaboration posters for spring and Easter and my spring math set. I’ve included a FREE math sheet sample in this post so you can try out one of my math sheets and see how your students like them!

Interactive and pattern filled coloring sheets for Spring and Easter.

These coloring sheets are much more then just coloring, they require that children really think to design them. Using a variety of suggested patterns, students will fill in each shape on the image. It takes a lot of 21st century problem solving and creativity skills to color these sheets. The best part is that no two sheets will ever be the same–they are as unique as the children–er, ARTIST–that created them. These are easy for classroom teachers because you simply need to make copies and provide kids with crayons, markers or colored pencils.  Basically, no prep–just print and go! Art teachers love using these designs as plans for spring-themed Pop Art paintings. Click HERE to preview this resource further.

When I first made my interactive coloring sheets, I only included 1 pre-pattern filled design per set. However, I’ve received a lot of feedback from teachers saying they would like to see more designs with the patterns already filled in. These pre-filled pattern designs make these sheets a lot more useful for teachers who work with very young students who would have too much trouble putting in the patterns themselves. They are also great for differentiation within a classroom where some kids can and some cannot add the patterns themselves. My Spring and Easter set now include all the designs in BOTH interactive AND pattern-filled opinions!

Spring Math Pop Art Coloring Sheets

I love designing lessons that make art integration easy for classroom teachers and really fun for kids. So last November, I started taking my holiday-related images and making them into math fact coloring sheets. I now have sets for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Spring. I got chills the first time my students colored these because all the chatter in the room was about the math and listening to them solve the math problems–and they never once complained about math! These sheets are great for early finishers and for having a fun, quick holiday-related lesson that still allows kids to practice their math facts…and who doesn’t need to review those facts! When they are finished and displayed they look absolutely stunning!!

Each set has four designs and the resource covers addition up to 20, subtraction from as high as 25, multiplication and division to cover all of the times tables from the 2’s to the 9’s! There are anywhere from 60-80 math fact problems per sheet. 

I have included one FREE sample page from my Spring Math product HERE for you to try!

Collaborative group Posters for Spring and Easter.

Art has so many wonderful aspects to it, but one of my favorite is how it brings people together and unites them. I love to create collaborative posters for this very reason. My spring and Easter collaborative posters are great for kids who are new to the concept of my posters or have done many of them before! Often teachers write me to tell me that their kids are always clamoring for more of these–they are that fun!

You could also use the spring butterfly poster for a unit on insects.

Once complete, the posters are approx. 28″ x 35″(depending on your printer settings). There are 20 pieces in each poster. For those of you with more than 20 kids in your class two students can work together on the more detailed pieces or you could make two posters…hang one in your class and one somewhere else in school!

Each student is given one piece of the poster and there is a key provided on the sheet telling the students what color to color each shape. Then the pieces are cut out and put together. 

Once assembled the posters make up very large classroom posters. The spring design is a beautiful butterfly and the Easter design is an intricate egg full of patterns and colors–both are very “Pop Art”y!

These posters take a group effort–everyone must participate to finish them and to look their best everyone has to give their best effort. These posters show that each individual student is as important as the others, for without one piece of the puzzle the poster would not be complete! These are great classroom team building lessons and then at the end you have something beautiful to hang up in your room or around your school. You’ll love to hear the kids “claim” their piece each time they walk by the poster with such pride, “I did that one!”

I hope you enjoyed a little breakdown of these art integration resources for Easter and spring and how they work in the classroom. Also, I hope the free math coloring sheet can be of some use to you this spring.

Don’t forget to check back for a review of my late-spring/early summer resources, such as posters for Earth Day , coloring sheets for Cinco de Mayo, and fun activities for Mother’s Day!

Thank you for reading and for making art with your students!

Jenny K.