Teaching Adjectives Through Art and Poetry

Crazy…Awesome…Fun…Wacky…Wild

Let’s talk about teaching adjectives. Specifically, how you can build interest and engagement by incorporating art and poetry into your lesson.

Are you looking for an adjectives activity? This activity is a unique and beautiful craft for kids. This art activity integrates with a lesson on adjectives. Students search for words to describe people in magazines and cut out the adjectives that fit the personality and appearance of their paintings. They glue the words throughout their art's hair. The project is completed by writing a descriptive poem. The finished poetry and the paintings make a great bulletin board or hallway display.

Textbooks, workbooks, and worksheets certainly have a role in the classroom. But for most students, those aren’t things that spark a joy for learning.

When we can move our learning outside of the textbook through activities like art, games, projects, etc., we reach more students.

Painting Crazy Hair People With Straws

When I saw an idea to use straw painting to make crazy hair art over at Art Projects for Kids, I knew I wanted to do something similar. However, it was important for me to make this an academic activity versus an art project.

I immediately knew that these paintings would pair well with learning about adjectives.

Materials Needed

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White art paper
Crayons
Liquid watercolor paints
Straws
Magazines or newspapers (optional – to find examples of adjectives to glue onto the hair)

Painting Directions

The first step in this project is to draw your person.

Make sure your person is bald and leave plenty of room for the hair.
Trace your drawing with a black crayon.
Color your person in completely. Don’t leave any uncolored spots on your person.

Then, use liquid watercolor paints to add crazy hair.

Dip a straw in the liquid watercolor paint and place it along the head’s edge.
Aiming the straw away from the face, blow hard through the straw to create crazy hair designs.
Repeat the process until you have a full head of hair.

Let the paint dry.

Parts of Speech Poetry

To make this an academic activity use old magazines to find adjectives that describe the crazy hair. Cut out the adjectives and glue them onto the hair.

Then, wrote a poem to go along with the crazy-haired people and mounted everything on a piece of construction paper.

The poems used the format of…

First line = Noun,
Second line = Noun,
Third line = Adjective Noun
Fourth line = Adjective Noun,
Fifth line = Adjective, Adjective, Adjective Noun
Sixth line = Adjective, Adjective, Adjective Noun
Seventh line = A sentence about the noun

Finally, cut out the poems, mount them onto construction paper, and then glue them onto the paintings.

My Go-To Resources for Teaching About Adjectives

Adjectives & Adverbs – Interactive worksheets, foldable pages, a craft, and more to make learning about adjectives and adverbs fun! They make great centers and review activities too.

Comparative & Superlative Adjectives – Interactive worksheets, foldable pages, a craft, and more to engage your class as they learn about comparative & superlative adjectives!

More Exciting Ideas for Teaching Adjectives

Hooks are awesome. They help students get focused on the concept you’re teaching, give context to the learning objectives, and more.

Click here to read about three exciting hook activities for introducing adjectives.

Hopefully, your students will enjoy this adjectives activity too. Please sign up below if you found this post helpful. You’ll get emails with more ideas, resources, information, and freebies.