watercolor birch trees

My lessons with Arts Outreach started last week and I'm going to try to be better at documenting my lessons this session. Albeit I didn't document this lesson as well as I had hoped...it's a little tricky to try and snap a few photos with a dozen pairs of eyes staring up at you waiting for instructions, and with only an hour to teach.

The first lesson of this session was a landscape class with a dozen first graders. I was a little lost at what to do with them until I saw this post on Mom's Crafty Space to make painters tape birch trees. Just by chance, I had just received a package from a giveaway I had entered and won, which included 4 rolls of painters tape! The decision to use this project for my lesson was pretty easy... 

About the only time consuming bit was taping the edges of all the kiddo's piece of watercolor paper. I wanted to make sure they had a nice frame around their piece so it was worth the extra bit of prep time. Then all we had to do was rip the tape into long strips and add some little branches to the trees. A lot of their trees ended up on the fatter side but they all turned out so great! They loved just getting messy with the watercolors (although a bit frustrated when I told them they could only use purple and blue) and it was fun to watch them sprinkle dump salt all over their pieces. It was a great and easy project to start off these 7 weeks of teaching.