Here are a whole slew of lessons I didn't have time to post about during the school year. This post has been sitting on my "to-do" list for a long time!!
5th Grade Birch Trees
For this lesson we tried our hands at homemade watercolors. The kids loved the idea of using materials they made from scratch to use in a painting, Unfortunately, the watercolors didn't come out half as vivid as the crayola standard sets so, I gave the kids the option of using them, and some did, but mostly the ended up using the palettes anyways. At least they had fun making them! For the painting itself, we used masking tape to mask off the "tree's", painted the background first, and then after removing the tape, added thin Sharpie lines and watercolor strokes to give the trees its trademark texture.
5th Grade Symbol Spoons
My fifth graders seriously blew my mind when making these spoons. The only requirement I gave them was to include at least 3 different symbols that represented themselves or their interests. What they came up with was AMAZING! We used tempera paint with modge podge instead of glaze so I could give them as many options for color as possible.
4th Grade Clay Looms and Weavings
In retrospect I wish I had taken more photo's of these, because they really were beautiful but I was so darn frustrated with this project, by the time I got the case up, I wanted nothing more to do with it!
If you ever have the kids make their own clay looms, be prepared to use A LOT of clay, and spend LOTS of time with the hot glue gun repairing cracks, chips, and breaks. Oh and possible a drill and drill bit for all those pesky holes that shrunk too small in the firing process even though though you told the kids 1000 times to make the holes BIG. OK, rant over!
This was the last project of the school year. I needed something fun, quick and gave the students enough freedom to stay engaged without giving them so much freedom that their summer jitters would create pandemonium during art!
