Spring Spirals

I love decorating for the various seasons and holidays.  It energizes me.

Children’s creations make the best decorations and displaying them is extremely important in building self-esteem and helping students take pride in their accomplishments.

Other teachers and students enjoyed going through my hallway “art museum” filled with “mess-terpieces”.

Their comments to my students were also very encouraging. I find that schools look more interesting, fun and inviting to visitors, when they are festooned with student "craftivities".

An announcement by our principal + warnings by teachers to “Keep your hands off the dangling decorations!” did a pretty good job of helping to keep things from getting slapped down.

Spring Spiral Shamrocks are one of those awesome tempting danglers.  A spiral offers great fine motor cutting skill practice.

If you are dealing with Y5’s and younger cut the spiral out so that they have a circle to hang on to when they cut. Remind them to stay on the “road” and continue to cut on the line as they go along.

Demonstrate this and show how you turn your circle as you cut showing  how the “road” will then spiral and dangle down.

Because I made lines across so that children know when to stop coloring, a few little ones might be tempted to cut across, so explain these lines as “stop” features for coloring and that they are NOT to be cut.

Because I teach about rainbows and rainbow color order in March, I like to combine those concepts with shamrocks to get more “bang for my time.”

You can make your ceiling display colorful by giving your students an assortment of rainbow-colored spirals to choose from, or you can have them color their spirals with crayons or markers.

Just and FYI that this is a lot of coloring for a little one as in order for the colors to be dramatic, you need to color both sides.

It is easier to color the spiral before it is cut out, but then in order to color the back, it needs to be cut out in order to see where to color.  This is definitely a task for older students.

You can add more colors of the rainbow with the center shamrock as I included a smaller shamrock template for the middle.

Simplify things and make it white or another shade of green or a variety of rainbow colors.

I wanted to show all of the rainbow colors so to create the cool effect pictured, I peeled broken crayons, sharpened them over my shamrock, put a piece of wax paper over the shavings and then pressed an iron on low heat on top of them, you’ll get an instant melted rainbow and lots of oooh’s and ahhh’s from your students.

I teach my students a short rainbow song to help them remember the color order of the rainbow.

Every year when we are working on a rainbow activity they burst into song.  This “craftivity” includes the song.

You can also add 3-D pizzazz to the back of your shamrock by cutting out 2 additional shamrocks, folding them in half gluing them together and then gluing the 3-D shamrock to the back of your flat one.

This additional step is also recommended for older students.  Punch a hole in the top of the shamrock, add a yarn loop and dangle from the ceiling.

If you want to put up a caption: ________________________’s class is spiraling into spring!  You can also skip the spiral and just do the melted crayon shamrock.  It makes a lovely March bulletin board.  Caption: __________________'s class is melting into spring! OR... Wishing you a colorful spring!

Click on the link to view/download Spring Spiral Shamrocks
Be sure and pop back tomorrow for What's In The Hat? A quick and easy shamrock review game.