Good Luck Dragons

3rd Grade students made good luck dragons in honor of Chinese New Year.  Using recycled items; egg cartons, paper towel tubes and paper cups, students created an armature for their dragons.

Foil was fashioned into a tail and eyes were made from recycled paper that was balled up and taped on the head.  The next step was to paper mache the dragons' body- I gave the students a choice of red, yellow or green, but any colors would do.  Once the paper mache was dry, it was time to decorate.  This part was so much fun!  The students used metallic markers to draw the scales on the body, tissue paper fire was placed in the dragon's mouth, eyes and nostrils were painted on, and horns were made from pipe cleaners.  The wings were made from gold metallic scrapbooking paper I purchased.  The students were shown how to fan fold their triangles to create the wings, then we put glue along the top edge of the wings and dipped them into glitter, to give it an extra magical touch.  Claws were made from scraps of black construction paper.  

The students enjoyed the PowerPoint on Chinese Dragons, learned a little bit about another cultures' traditions, and had a blast creating their sculptures.  This project required three art classes, that would normally last 50 minutes, but since I don't have a class that comes in right after this one, the three classes were all extended ones.  Otherwise, this project probably would have taken about 4-5 classes to complete.  For this reason, after the second class I made these with, I saw the writing on the wall and decided to do oil pastel drawings of dragons with the rest of the third grade classes.  I'll do a post on that project soon.

Let Them Make Cake!

    4th grade students LOVED our cake sculpture project!  Wayne Thiebaud's cake paintings and Claes Oldenberg's food sculptures were our  art inspirations for this project.  It all started when I was gifted with "Sculpt-a-mold"- an instant paper mache product that comes dry like a dried paper pulp and you mix water with it to get an oatmeal-like mixture that can be sculpted around an armature.  I had a lot of this to work with and thought it might be fun if we learned a little about math, sculpture, pop art, cake decorating and even photography.  

    We began with a simple wedge shape of cardboard and a long piece of cardboard, about 3" x 15".  I showed the students how to wrap the cardboard around the wedge, lining up the top edges of their cardboard pieces and taping it well so that there were no openings in the seam.  Then it was time to start sculpting.  I gave them big, heaping plates of sculpt-a-mold and showed them how to take a small amount in their fingers and pat it out into a thin layer all over their armature.  Once this part was complete, it took about 4-5 days for the cakes to dry and harden.  This was perfect, since I only see my students once every two weeks.  The next time they had art class, we painted our cakes.  Since the next step was to make decorations for our cakes out of Model Magic, the paint needed to be dry first.  So, in our third art class the students could finally make their decorations.  Since it was right before Christmas, I found they wanted to make a lot of snowmen and Christmas type decorations, they also wanted to "write" things on their cakes with letters made from the modeling clay.  I showed them how they could use watercolor markers to tint the clay before they molded it, or even to color it once it was already molded.

    This is still a project in progress... the next step is to photograph the cakes and open them up in an image editing program on the computer to manipulate our photographs into pop art pictures a la Wayne Thiebaud.  I will update this post with more photos of cakes and pop art photos as they are completed.  This was a fun, all beit, time consuming project, but one I think the students will never forget!  Since I teach art on a cart at this school, their classrooms looked like bakeries for quite some time and the cakes were quite the topic of conversation.  The students and staff were amazed at how real the sculptures looked and I think they enjoyed the whimsy of it all.  My students kept saying, over and over, Art is so much fun!  

Paper Sculptures

    Kindergartners made these beautiful paper sculptures using construction paper scraps and a lot of creativity!  Learning about shapes is basic to art and to math, and is something that kindergarten students are very familiar with.  Even geometric shapes are being taught at this grade level- cubes, prisms, etc.  The students have seen the shapes and even held them in their hands with models in their classrooms, built with them, done puzzles with them, cut them out of handouts, but, most have not constructed them with their own hands.  The students absolutely loved making circles, ovals, spirals, squares, arches, zig zags, overlapping and interconnected shapes, and even shapes that have no name!  As they cut, twisted, folded and glued, you could just see the wheels spinning in their heads!  One student told his classroom teacher in a soft voice, "I'm so excited".  She asked, "About what?"  He pointed to his art work and said, "About this".  He perfectly described the feeling in the room... one of excitement and joy as each child was discovering what they could create with their minds and their hands.  He perfectly described in his quiet little way, why I do art and why I am an art teacher.  When I see what I can make with my mind and my hands, when I see what my students can make, I feel so excited... oh, the possibilities!  If I can do this, what more can I do?!!!  Let's find out together...