- What's New in K-2
- Posts
- 🎨 Integrating art into the K-2 curriculum
🎨 Integrating art into the K-2 curriculum
Inside: Google Arts & Culture, National Geographic projects, and a drawing lesson with Library Mouse!
Karly Moura & Christina Sciarrotto
April 07, 2026
Unleashing Creativity: Arts, Tech, and Literacy
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in K-2! As we look for fresh ways to engage our K-2 learners each week, this week we will share resources designed to blend technology, literacy, and the arts into your daily routine. From the whimsical, AI-powered melodies of Google Arts and Culture to the curriculum-aligned lessons of Arts Now, this edition is all about finding the "art" in everything we teach. Whether you are folding your way through the alphabet with Origami Club or exploring the intersection of art and science with National Geographic, these tools are perfect for sparking curiosity and building fine motor skills in your youngest explorers. Dive in and find your next favorite classroom activity!
Inside:
💡 Tips, Tools and Templates: Integrating Art
📺 Teaching with TeachFlix Junior: Read Set Draw: The Library Mouse
😄 Giggle of the Week: Glitter
❤️ Share your ideas with us!
💡 Tips, Tools and Templates
5 ways to integrate art into the K-2 classroom
Image created with Google Gemini
Integrating art into the K-2 classroom offers a vibrant way to enhance creative expression in young learners. By blending arts, technology, and literacy into the K-2 classroom, teachers are engaging students as well as unleashing student creativity.
Here are 5 ways to start incorporating art into your day.
🌎 Interactive Digital Exploration: Google Arts and Culture offers a unique opportunity for students to explore using technology. Have your students try “Paint with Music” or Blob Opera. Want to learn more about Google Arts and Culture? Check out Ditch That Textbook’s “20 things you didn’t know you could do with Google Arts and Culture.”
🎨 Arts Integration and Science Alignment: Arts Now offers integrated and stand alone lessons on grade level and grade band. Most integrated lessons will align to your science curriculum including: day and night, plants and animals, changes in seasons, and states of matter.
✏️ Guided Drawing and Craft Resources: Art Projects for Kids offers drawing, crafts, painting and coloring activities for your students. Step by step directions and downloaded resources are available.
🪭 Origami Art: Create letters of the alphabet using this guide. Red Ted Art offers easy tutorials to create origami animals, flowers, insects, and more. National Geographics for Kids and World Wildlife Fund feature various animals, plants, and inserts to create with PDF downloads.
🪼 New! Digital Artistry with Project Aqua:: Adobe’s Project Aqua is a kid-friendly creativity app (ages 5-12) designed for iPad and iPhone. It offers professional-grade creative tools simplified for young hands, allowing students to use "Magic" AI filters and stickers to take their digital drawings to the next level in a safe, ad-free environment. Watch: Ann Kozma and Shel McConville introduce Adobe Aqua on Adobe Live.
📺 Teaching with Teachflix Junior
📚🐁 Ready Set Draw | LIBRARY MOUSE!
🎥 Video Link: Ready Set Draw - Library Mouse
If you can draw a circle and a square, then you can draw Sam, from LIBRARY MOUSE! Grab some paper and a marker, and join author/illustrator Daniel Kirk as he teaches us to draw simplified versions of his amazing, painted illustrations.
Key points covered in the video:
Learn how to draw Sam, the Library Mouse by using basic shapes (circles and squares).
Use a pencil or a Sharpie marker to follow along.
Ready-made video resources:
Check out Kids Lit’s Ready Set Draw series to get inspirations from children’s picture books and their illustrators. Episodes are posted regularly with a chance to share your artwork on #ReadySetDraw on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. (https://www.kidlit.tv/category/ready-set-draw/)
🤭 Giggle of the Week
Glitter sounds great… to the children who leave the sparkling tornado in their wake.
h/t to ElementaryTeacherResources.com