Brooklyn Post Cards + Pen Pals

My mom teaches 3rd grade in San Francisco so when I met my 3rd graders for the first time I knew I wanted to do a Pen Pal project.  Who doesn't love getting a personal, hand made card in the mail?  I also thought it would be a neat way for the kids to teach each other about their cities.  We looked at images of Brooklyn cityscapes and urban landmarks and thought of special places in our own neighborhoods.  To create the cards, Students then watercolored a background on postcard sized watercolor paper that I found at a craft store.  To make the cityscapes even more "New York" they cut out buildings and city elements from the New York Times.  They finished off their collages with sharpies.  On the back they wrote letters to their Pen Pals in San Francisco, telling them about their favorite places in Brooklyn.  The most exciting part was getting wonderful cards back from San Francisco.  

Pop-up Landscapes

Since January, this first grade class has been learning all about city scapes and landscapes. The concept was introduced when we read "Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold and students created their own city scapes featuring meaningful places in Brooklyn using oil pastel watercolor resist. We then moved onto landscapes where students were encouraged to create a 2D imaginary landscape using construction paper collage.

With this project we "pulled" our landscapes up off the page to assemble imaginary sculptural landscapes. We explored the different shapes we could make when we folded, bent, ripped, twisted and crumpled strips of construction paper. I demonstrated how to attach these shapes to their paper plates by folding a tab at the end of each strip of paper (a flat surface for their dot of glue). Materials: construction paper cut into strips, leftover paper scraps in various shapes from collage, glue sticks, paper plates.