Finger Painted Christmas Tree Cards

During December, I my theme is Christmas related art. With my second year students we worked on a tie-dye card. With my first year students we made our tree using finger paint. I gave students a square piece of paper that they painted in different shades of green. I only gave them one shade of green at a time so that we would be able to see each shade in the final image instead of all the shades mixing and making a muddled messy tree. Once the tree was dry, they traced a triangle stencil I gave them and cut on the lines they traced. I had them paint before cutting the triangle shape so that they would paint all the tree evenly because instead they would avoid  painting the edges of the triangle and a lot of the paint would be concentrated on the center of the tree.

Next, students painted the folded paper red and glued their tree on it once it had dried. Our tree needed decoration so we traced circles, cut them and glued glitter on them. Students also followed a step by step instruction to draw a star on gold paper. 

When students worked with glitter, I had it divided by colors and we talked about what would happen if we were careless and all our glitter colors combined. Even though they were very young and I was hesitant to let them use glitter alone, my students showed me they could be responsible, take care of materials and use them properly. Students went up to the glitter in groups of 2 or 3, they could only use one color at a time so there would be no crowding and we would avoid a glitter chaos. If students were done with their 3 ornaments quickly, they were able to make more ornaments to add. 

Once we finished our ornaments, we glued them on our tree and wrote a message for our parents.