Our 2nd Graders Created Beautiful and Unique StickTogether Pixel Art and Amazing Fish Stories After Reading Only One You!

I love collaborating with the teachers at my school, especially when we tie in so many of our favorite topics...books, art and a little technology. 

And to make it even better, I love collaborating and co-teaching with my teacher friends like Tracy Ferguson, one of our 2nd grade teachers at Van Meter. 

This fall, we created and worked on a special project using StickTogether's FREE Pixel Art site. We decided to use it in a way where the students would be able to create something special and unique to them. 

We picked the book Only One You by Linda Kranz to kick it off.  This book has such a wonderful message for readers by showing students how there is only one you in this big world. 

Her illustrations are so unique and beautiful.  The fish are painted rocks and each one has a different design. 

After we read the book, the 2nd graders went to the Pixel Art site through their Google Classroom. 

The Pixel Art site found here gives students a place to design their own sticker poster, just like the StickTogether sticker posters.  

The students created such beautiful fish using the Pixel Art site. 

As they finished them up, we have them Generate PDF's and download to their Chromebook. 

To make it really easy for students to share their pixel art work with us, we created a Padlet and shared the link in the class Google Classroom. 

They uploaded the two files onto the Padlet. 

One is the blank sticker poster and the other....

....gives the colored sticker poster. 

You will find their StickTogether pixel art creations here on this Padlet. After all of the posters are on the Padlet, I head to the copy machine to print them. 

Their name is on the bottom of each poster so it makes it easy to identify each. 

As we handed out the sticker posters, Tracy organized all of the stickers. She put a sticky note with the letter that corresponds with each colored sticker. 

The student look at the StickTogether Color Key found here and found the colored stickers they needed for their posters. 

Here is the Pixel Art Starter Pack from StickTogether filled with all of the stickers. 

The students love seeing their posters come to life with stickers. 

Every one was absolutely beautiful...

...and so unique as they came together to create a big school of fish. 

But, that's not it to this project! 

One day I came into Tracy's room and this little friend came up to me with the biggest smile on his face. 

He said, Mrs. Miller, we created Fish Stories to go along with our sticker posters. 

They wrote a story about their fish and typed it up in a Google Doc. 

They took the picture of their StickTogether Pixel Art fish and inserted it into the Google Doc, alongside the story. 

Tracy made the fish stories into a book for each student and...

...printed them off to hang up on their Writing Wall. 

This was such a special way to kick off the year with Tracy and her 2nd graders. We have lots of really neat StickTogether Pixel Art projects happening at our school. I can't wait to share more with all of you, friends.