My first graders have been reading the If You Give books by Laura Numberoff. I am sure most of you are familar with these. She wrote If You Give A Mouse A Cookie and If You Give A Moose A Muffin. Recently, the first grade teachers asked me to create an art lesson around these books. This is what I came up with.
For this project, I had my students come up with their own If You Give scenarios. Each child chose an animal and a food for it to eat. The head then opens up, and on the inside lists the drink he will want after.
We had to get this project done in one hour, so it required a little prep work on my part. To make life easier, I gave each child a piece of paper already folded in half with a head shape drawn on it. This made sure that all drawing were being done along the fold, and would be able to open up. Then, each child turned this shape into whatever animal they wished. Some even chose to turn it into an alien or monster. They did this by adding eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc. Everything was drawn with marker and colored with crayons.
For the part with the words, I wrote it out by hand, and photocopied it onto construction paper. This way, the students only had to write the animal, food, and drink words onto their paper. Even then, I had to help a lot of the kids with spelling. Even with so much prep work, we just barely finished in our hour long time slot. However, these turned out wonderful, even if we were rushed.