Start the month out by making a big bang for the new year. Celebrate the beginning of the month and a brand new year by making a coffee can drum. Children can bring in a coffee can with the lid. Decorate with paints or cover with construction paper. Add feathers or foam shapes, glitter or beads. Replace the lid and you have an instant drum band. Add some plastic soda bottle shakers and the kids can really rock. These are made by decorating plastic soda bottles the same way as the coffee cans, then adding in 1/4 cup of popcorn kernels for each bottle, replacing the caps and shaking away.
Using some interesting days from the calendar, you can have off the wall fun with things like "Old Rock Day," "Apricot Day" and Make Your Dreams Come True Day." Make a pet rock, apricot pit mobile or a dreamcatcher to celebrate these wacky holidays. For the pet rock, you need a selection of medium sized stones, paints, googly eyes and other decorations. Have the kids glue on the eyes for their "pet" and decorate as desired. For the apricot mobile, they can string apricot pits to two drinking straws, criss cross the straws together and have an adult staple them in place. Then, decorate the mobile and hang it up. Dream catchers are made by weaving string around two drinking straws which have been bent into a circle with the ends fit into each other to hold it together. Hang feathers and beads to complete the project.
An educational experiment, such as making a kite, can be a great art project and learning opportunity on Benjamin Franklin's birthday. A simple kite can be made with a paper grocery bag, drinking straws, string and tape. Decorating can add to the fun. Martin Luther King Day is an excellent opportunity to explore unity with a box of crayons project, in which each child creates a self portrait on a crayon shaped piece of construction paper. See "Resources" for a poem that enhances the meaning behind this project. When the portraits are done and the box of crayons is put together with all the kids' faces, teach the children how all different types of people can fit together in the same place.