Seems weird not to be doing these...

I get bored easily, so in my years as an elementary art teacher, I would continually try out new ideas with my students, and I liked to introduce the kids to different artists each year. When I repeated a project or idea, I tried to give it a new 'spin'. But there were certain projects I did every year without fail, and never tired of them (I suppose that's like a singer singing the same favorite song in concert after concert, year after year).  They were the projects everyone expected to see, no matter what.

But this year, I am retired, and this time of year, four particular annual projects are on my mind, and are not likely to be in my replacement's repertoire.

Thumbprint Pussywillows!

 *Note: the pussywillow pic at the top of this post was found on facebook, and I apologize that I do not know the source.  But it's so cute I wanted to share it with you!  
Before everything starts to blossom and bloom in the spring, there are the pussywillows! Year after year, in early March, I have slogged around in melting snow to find pussywillows and bring them to school for my kindergartners to see and touch. In years where I couldn't find them outside, I resorted to purchasing them in the floral department of my local supermarkets.  I'd put some on each table, and we would examine how the black seed pods would open and let the little soft silvery pussywillows out.  The kids would color a vase, and maybe a table, on colored construction paper, and draw the stems and seed pods.  Then, with tempera paint (a mix of white with a dab of black and a hint of silver) they would use their little thumbs to stamp the soft fluffs.

 
Spring Hats!
You may call them Easter bonnets, but this little Jewish art teacher (me) simply called them spring hats, and my kindergartners made them every year before spring break. The materials were paper plates with a hole punched on each side and a ribbon or hunk of fat yarn strung through, colored paper tape, scissors, and moist sponges to activate the glue on the paper tape.  The kids learned how to fold, cut, bend, twist, and curl the tape, and the hats became as crazy as they wanted.  Here's a group of happy kindergartners!


Teddy Bear Chairs! 

The 2nd graders in my school district take an annual springtime field trip to tour the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory,  traveling by ferry across Lake Champlain to get there.  Many of the students purchase a Build-a-Bear while at the factory, plus they all have some sort of stuffed animal friend at home.  So each year, my 2nd grade students built teddy bear chairs, out of 4 toilet paper cores (the legs), 2 paper towel cores (the back supports),  two 7" squares of cardboard from shipping cartons (the seat and the back), and Elmer's Glue-All.  We painted them either with acrylic paints, or tempera covered with a tempera varnish or Mod Podge to seal the paint.  I think my replacement has chosen to make bear beds instead, and I'm sure they will be adorable.  But they won't be the chairs!

Q-Tip Lilacs! 

I have some lilac trees in my backyard.  Every year when they bloomed, I would cut big bunches of them and bring them to my art room, putting a vase full of fragrant flowers on every table.  Ahhh!! Every year, one first grade teacher, upon smelling the flowers, would say this to her little ones: "Do your very best today!  This is my favorite project!  I will hang them all up for Author's Day!"  Then the students would create a vase, a table, stems, and leaves, and finally paint the flowers using Q-Tips with with various tints of violet, lilac, blue, pink, and white.  Over the years, the vase, table, stems and laves were done with various materials: crayon, oil pastel, collage, etc., but the flowers always were exuberantly painted with cotton swabs. 

Some teddy bears are going to be very happy!

Making teddy bear chairs is an annual 2nd grade project in my art room, and the kids really look forward to it. In the spring, the 2nd grade classes go on a fun field trip to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory, crossing Lake Champlain via ferry on the return trip. Many of the kids make Build-a-Bears while at the factory, and the bears will all have chairs to sit on when they get to their new homes with their 2nd grade companions.

This is a ridiculously easy project, with 100% success. I send a letter home asking for cardboard rolls from toilet paper and tin foil, paper towels, plastic wrap, etc., and I end up with way more than I will need. Even now, every day I find another bag of cardboard rolls by my door, which is so funny since the chairs are all built and mostly painted!!

Meanwhile, way back in the fall, when I received my new supplies, I cut up the shipping cartons into 7" squares, two for each 2nd grader. I'm sure other sizes would work, but this size seems "just right" to me. I have an old "workhorse" paper cutter that makes easy work of cutting up the cardboard.

To build the chairs, we do it in little steps over a period of three art classes, while working on other projects. For the first session, each child is given a cardboard square, and their name and class is written on it in the middle. One table is set up with newspapers on it, and a dish of Elmer's Glue-All. My big box full of cardboard rolls is on the floor. Two at a time, I call kids to put the legs on their chair. They go to the box, pick out 4 toilet paper rolls and check to make sure they are matching in length. Then they dip them in the glue, slosh them around, and stick one on each corner of the square, with their name in the middle. This year the kids then carried them to the hallway where we lined them up to dry, legs up, until the end of the day. In a class of 23 kids, everyone got them done in one class and also worked on another project. I glued legs on for anyone who was absent.

In the next art class, the chairs were turned right side up, and two posts (paper towel-size rolls) are glued on adjacent corners, using the same process. These become the supports for the back of the chair.

In the 3rd art class, the chairs are placed on their backs. Each child gets another cardboard square, and lays them on the posts marking the top of the square on each post with a pencil. The posts are painted with Elmer's Glue-All up to the mark, and the backs are placed onto the wet glue. The chairs dry laying on their backs. Again, this is done a couple of kids at a time while the another project is ongoing.

Finally, in the 4th class, the kids begin to paint. Some years I've used tempera, but others, like this year, I use school acrylics, and I think it gives the best results. I mix up a ton of colors in plastic souffle cups with covers, and place them all on the round table in the center of the room. Kids pick one color at a time to use, and are pretty well-trained in washing brushes. (Tables are newspaper covered, and brushes are wiped on the paper, washed, and wiped again before being dipped in a new color.) Most colors were pre-mixed by me with a little white to give them better coverage, and no black was put out to use until the 2nd class period for painting (most kids were done painting in 2 sessions). Some years, time permitting, I've had the kids paint a coating of an acrylic gloss varnish over the chair. It looks nice but is time-consuming. Also, some years I've used slats instead of squares for the back, and they look very cute too.

Here's the back of a chair, and a chair in use! This chair is actually blue and purple, not blue on blue, but I cannot seem to get the photo to show the true color.

By the way, the original inspiration for these chairs was in an article I saw many many years ago in School Arts magazine. If you like making the chairs and have lots of cardboard and cardboard tubes, and have time to spare, or maybe an after-school group, you could get really creative and make little tables or desks to go with the chairs! What fun!!

Random Views from a Busy Week in the Art Room

More cats underway. I like the whiskers on the cat on the left. The green one in the center is the largest of all the cats, and has cougar pawprints on it - our team mascot is the Cougar and our school colors are green and gold. But the sad story about this cat is that it will have to wait at least a couple of weeks to receive eyes and to be completed. The boy who is making it, an athletic, exuberant, outgoing, fun sort of boy, tripped in a running game outside in gym class (during last week's run of summer weather) and severely broke his arm. I mean the bone broke in at least 2 places and slipped down inside his arm, and he had surgery done and will be out for a while, and when he's back it will be with a cast right up to his shoulder. And this is of course his right arm, and he's right-handed, and baseball season is starting, and he's a HUGE baseball player. Poor kid.

The unfinished yellow cat below (love the tilt of the head) has an Autism Awareness ribbon on its back, in honor of the sweet younger brother of the lovely girl making the cat.

Below is "camo-cat". The next two cats are really intriguing - can't wait to see how they will look when complete!

Here's a cave painter entering a cave through a tunnel...

And below are a couple of the annual kindergarten thumbprint pussywillows. The color is all wrong on the photo on the right but I can't correct it somehow. The paint was a pale silvery gray and the paper was pink. I forgot to photograph the rest. I took some better photos last year and posted them here. Process was the same, but I used a different size/shape paper this year (longer and narrower) because I had extremely tall real pussywilllows to show the kids.

Painting of teddy bear chairs is underway!

And finished kitties have been moved to the library for display. This is how I've made room for the teddy bear chairs and the garden gnomes (which I'll show you more of in a couple of days.)

Busy busy busy!

My art room is like a cat hospital

A cat hospital filled with unfinished kitties - waiting for whiskers and noses,
eyes, and some patterns, and a little TLC.
It's kind of like Edward Scissorhands - their Creators have gone home for the weekend and left them incomplete, banding together to fend for themselves against the elements. Poor kitties.

Or maybe just waiting for a pat on the head or a rub on the tummy.
But this one is not made out of papier-mache.

And now for a little more art room crazies - here's the next step with that shredded paper I showed you. We are mixing it with papier-mache goo ("dog drool") till the paper breaks down and becomes clay-like. Fun, fun, fun....

And a tower of teddy bear chairs in-progress obliterating my word wall. On Monday 2nd graders will complete their construction so we can begin painting them later in the week.

And then, today, Saturday, I poured OJ and milk at our annual Teachers Association sponsored free community pancake breakfast, and then helped direct kids to transform an old flat into something useable for the grade 5-8 musical production of Cinderella, coming soon. I'll add something that looks like framing on the window when the stones are dry. The kids did a good job, but boy oh boy, the kids looked like a mess when they were done!

What we've been up to - busy busy!

I've been doing a little lesson stealing. This layered landscape lesson was taken from a School Arts magazine in ...2003!! My kindergartners have been enjoying it ever since. The kids start with 4 black "landscape lines", and then color in between with chalk pastel, rubbing each color with a finger and tapping the dust off onto newspaper. They are so proud! One little boy kept scratching his face and looked like he was growing a beard. The classroom teacher and I were in stitches - he was just TOO cute, with loopy blond curls, apple cheeks, and a chalk beard and mustache!


And here's another couple of stolen lessons - so many of you have done the "Giraffes Can't Dance" lesson, but I originally "stole" it from the wonderful Patty at http://www.deepspacesparkle.com/. This work was done by my first graders.

Meanwhile, I've been making teddy bear chairs with my 2nd graders for years, since they tour the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory every spring. I think the original motivation for this lesson came from School Arts magazine.

These two lessons above were not stolen; they're mine! A couple of weeks ago, my kindergartners made these fingerprint rainbows. In our next art class, the kids colored a sunshine and painted blue skies. While they were drying, they cut out their rainbows and made some clouds out of bumpy Braille paper that was given to me. Then they glued them all together! Ironically, a few days ago I found a similar rainbow project posted here: http://splishsplashsplatterart.blogspot.com/2011/04/rainbow-finger-painting.html. I guess that's proof that our brains are working in parallel universes!

The ice cream cones, which we are (obviously) just beginning in grade 4, happened for 2 reasons. First of all, our Artist of the Month (officially for May, but we already began) is Wayne Thiebaud. Second of all, I was "gifted" with about a zillion paper cones. So it seemed like fate! The instructions were simple, and we are working with a short time frame to get them done, so the rule was this: build the structure in one class. Some kids put on one scoop, some two, some three, some four...and I think the one on the left was the biggest at 5 scoops plus a cherry on top.

Meanwhile, my 3rd graders still have more work to do to complete their papier-mache masks, 5th graders are loving blind contour drawing and learning about their right brains, and 6th graders are making AWESOME African-inspired masks with tooling foil.

Only One You

Last week I read this marvelous book, Only One You, with my 2nd graders. The fish in it are so cute, shaped like little rocks or Easter eggs. We made our own fish in the style of the fish in the book, using Sharpies and watercolors, with lopsided sideways heart-shaped mouths and big circular eyes. When we were done, we felt badly for the fish, having no tails and fins, so we glued on tissue paper scraps and added them on even though they weren't in the book.



Then they needed an ocean to swim in, and what fun my 2nd graders had on Friday painting the ocean! I gave each table a sheet of paper to paint (the paper was 16"x24"), varieties of blue and white tempera, giant bristle paintbrushes, and sponge squares on clothespin handles, and by the end of the morning the tables were blue, our hands were blue, the sun was shining and it was actually above 50 degrees and I opened the windows, and everyone was smiling and happy! The kids scrubbed the tables shiny clean, and a couple of nice 4th graders in my room for lunchtime washed all the brushes. My fingers still seem a little blue...



At the end of the day, I took all the painted papers and stapled them end-to-end on a bulletin board and finally stapled on all the fish. Here's the bulletin board:


The book has all these wonderful words of wisdom in it, and it was my original intent to get those words on the bulletin board as well, maybe inside bubbles? I ran out of time, but I will re-hang the bulletin board for our art show in mid-May, so by then we should have the bubbles and words to complete the board. Here's a sampling of the text:



And if that wasn't all enough to accomplish in three of art classes, we have now also completed step 3 of our teddy bear chairs (gluing on the backs), and they will be ready to begin painting in the next 2nd grade art class! So the chairs should be complete in time for any Build-a-Bears purchased when the 2nd grades take the ferry over Lake Champlain on their field trip to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory in May.

Beginnings

Third graders have begun the armature for their papier-mache masks. We begin by stuffing a paper lunch bag with crumpled newspaper pages, and then features are added with toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, cereal box cardboard, bottlecaps, styrofoam balls, etc, and carefully placed masking tape. The kids learn that "tape doesn't stick to air or sunlight", so they pinch it in tightly to whatever is being taped. The learned to cut tabs to flare out at the bottom of cardboard tubes, and they learned to tape over this in the shape of a tic tac toe board to secure it on well. We've just begun, but expect to see ears, horns, beaks, and more. I'll post more down the road...

And we've now done step two on our 2nd grade teddy bear chairs - adding the posts on the back. Next step will be to add the backs, and then we'll paint.