This is a great budget friendly activity to expand your art activities.
This is similar to the foil printmaking I posted recently, but this time we carved using real carving tools (which I found at a local store for like 2 dollars per kit) and a dull pencil. I was able to get sheets of Styrofoam for 1 dollar, I could cut out 2 of them and have enough for the whole class. You will need brayers and acrylic paint.
I first asked the students to design a simple and large drawing with lots of texture. Could be anything, a fruit, an animal, a landscape, a plant….anything, and I asked to design in the sketchbooks we use for planning (A4) and I previously cut out the Styrofoam the same size. I emphasized the use of different lines to add texture, and to think differently this time (say we need lines to represent the wind or simply to cover up the background). I made a sample myself, a tree, with wind on the sides and lots of grass in the ground floor, the tree itself was full of leaves. This helped the students realize they would need to add a lot of lines all over their design. Once we finished, I handed the Styrofoam and the carving tools, and asked them to make their drawing again on the Styrofoam (using a pencil) and then tracing harder with the tool they felt more comfortable with (in my case a simple pencil). We need deeper lines, but not too dip as to break the printing plates, my grade 4s where pretty good on this.
Once the plates were ready (do check, I had to send everybody back to carve harder) we took turns printing in a table I have set in the front. I handed a grid activity to the rest of the class so I could focus on 4 or 5 students printing at a time. Put a squeeze of a dark acrylic paint (black, red or dark blue work best) in a flat surface and smooth up up with a brayer, transfer the paint on the brayer to the printing plate, and cover all of the surface with paint. Put a white piece of cardboard on top and use a clean brayer to press evenly on top of the paper. Remove piece of paper as quick as possible to reveal a lovely print on the other side.
I found out that acrylic paint would dry incredibly fast and 3 students ended up with the paper ripping off when they tried to peel from the plate. I sent them to wash the plate and remove any piece of paper left. We then repeated and it worked well. Keep adding water if the paint feels too thick but not so much as to dilute the color, you want it as dark as possible!
This activity is great for doing things differently, and forcing kids to plan their work in a out of the box way, you really need to think “the other way around”, say, if you want your print to read HELLO, you need to carve the letters as if reflected in a mirror. Kids really enjoyed the process and they want to repeat. Hope it turns out well for you too!
1st Class Art 
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