Chinese New Year

Last month I picked up this adorable resource from Expressive Monkey:

Every day before leaving I placed this activity on top of my desk as a potential sub lesson. It is full of directed drawing options for creating a Chinese New Year Rat or Mouse and I felt confident that anyone would be able to step in and deliver this lesson.

Chinese New Year falls on January 25th this year and I am SO HAPPY that I wasn't absent in December, because now I get to do this lesson with my classes. As I began thinking through the steps I would take to use this activity with my students, I recalled a favorite lesson from a few year's ago.

The model magic mouse paint lesson was already a remix of a very old lesson. Was it time to remix once again? With 2020 being the year of the rat, it appears that it was! The focus of the old lesson was color mixing, using primary colors of model magic. Since I hadn't planned to do this lesson, I wasn't fully stocked to offer red model magic to every student.

Last year, one of my schools was without a kiln and I quickly leaned on model magic as my go-to sculptural medium. Painting white model magic with liquid watercolors yields beautiful color saturation, and I have plenty of red watercolor. Knowing I was covered in the materials department I set to work on a sample.

Just painting the rat red during the 2nd session wouldn't take very much time. I decided that in this remix, students would need to add designs or symbols. Once again I turned to the pages from Expressive Monkey's drawing activity. They are so helpful and student-friendly that I trust my students will be able to decorate their rat with black permanent marker.

I have this lesson targeted for my 1st grade classes. Both the design and painting steps are easily accomplished in one forty-minute class.





















If you want to give it a go and skip the lesson prep, this is now available in the shop. I highly recommend using Expressive Monkey's drawing activity (available on her site or TpT). There are pages and pages of design ideas for every teacher or homeschooler's comfort level. Please tag me on instagram if you decide to try this one out. I love seeing the unique results other students produce.