Henri the Art Butterfly

Henri- Newly Formed Chrysalis

Henri- Today- you can see his wings

As I said in a previous post, our artist of the month is Henri Matisse (whose birthday is on December 31st).  I made a page on my school wordpress blog http://teachers.stjohns.k12.fl.us/wardley-j/artist-of-the-month/
that has great resources for each artist of the month.  If you scroll down to December- there is a great short video about Matisse that I show my classes.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7OmJ_tTLTQ

We named one of the monarch caterpillars that I kept in my plastic butterfly habitat after him.

Well today, the first graders were finishing their balanced bug art lesson and I was showing them his cocoon.  I noticed that the color had changed over the weekend from a bright lime green to a dark grey AND you can SEE HIS MONARCH WINGS through the shell!  That must mean that he will be hatching soon!  SO COOL!  Mean while, we listened to Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar
and the students that had finished their Balanced Bug on paper, used Educreations on their iPad to take a picture of the art bug and write/record their own story about it.  IT WAS AWESOME!!!  Educreations is such a great app for younger k-2 to use and the first graders got really creative.  I used Doceri( which  is similar to Doceri but with more tools) to record my version of the Story- The Very Hungry Bee.
I also recorded- The Paintbrush Tales- using iMovie- the Movie Trailers to remind students to take care of their paintbrushes (you can see I really do not like washing brushes all day!:))