Art Lessons

Here's a few art lessons I did with my granddaughter's third grade class before their winter break.  We painted meditative circles, one inside the other.  The children stood, dipped their brushes into the black paint, then, with their whole arm, painted the circles going around and around many times--it's a peaceful meditative feeling and we did this in total silence--dipping back into the paint when their brushes became dry.  We created the 3D tube effect by repeating a curved line around the tube. With a dry brush they shaded the inner and outer edges of their tube.  (I didn't let on that these would become donuts!)
    The next week, I had them guess what these could become and they liked the idea of donuts.  We drew on the sprinkles with colored markers, cut them out--cut out a big bite--glued it onto a background and glued on the crumbs.  Another possibility for this lesson would be to make some fluffy clouds with white chalk pastels on the background--to have that large donut in the sky effect!

These note pads were created in one, 1 hour lesson, but with a lot of prep!  I wanted the students to make a possible gift they could give during the holidays.  I used old computer paper that has the holes on the sides which I happen to have a large stack of.  I cut this up so each pad has 12 pages.  I sewed across the top for the perforated line to tear out pages.  Cut, threaded (plastic yarn needles of which I have a classroom set of), and knotted the 25 strands of yarn.  Cut a variety of the color paper, using the thin paper on rolls from the school's supply room--(this paper is thin and flexible for ease in folding and cutting through layers).  I made a batch of wheat paste and dolled that out into small sealed containers for two students to share.  To lessen the mess of glitter and eliminate a glitter station were students would have to get up while other's waited, I wrapped up just a few little scoops of glitter in some tiny cupcake liners for each student.
   After sewing the tops and doing a very simple end off, they scribbled on the top page with colored markers--folded and cut shapes into the color paper--putting a piece of newspaper under the top page, they painted the wheat paste over the scribbles to smear the marker and to adhere the cut out paper--Then the sparkles!  Please excuse the details, I'm listing all these steps of prep and the making of, for my own benefit.  I can then easily look this up if I were to do this lesson again sometime.