Art to Melt Over

I like to start the year off with a fun, attention grabbing art project to set the tone for the year and get the kids (and their families) hooked on second grade because if they aren't begging for more school by the end of the first week my job over the next nine months is a lot harder.

Melted crayon art was all the rage last year, with the junior high art class becoming the envy of the school, so I decided to hook my kids with a spin on this "old" favorite. It took some coordinating, more for bigger classes, but it was well worth the effort for the looks of pride on the kids faces when they received a special invitation down to the 6th grade classroom to present on how they'd created their masterpieces.

Step 1: We put down a large piece of butcher paper to put the canvases on so the splatter wouldn't get on the carpet. But, it also gave the kids something to pull up over their legs so like the carpet they were safe from splatter.


Step 2: Each student picked three crayons and peeled the paper half way down on each.
2 similar colors and one contrasting color, like red, pink, and blue.

 Step 3: We used a hair dryer to melt the crayons until the wax dripped onto the canvas.
Note: I held the crayon for this step due to wax splatter concerns. Next time I'll probably give them protective gloves and have them do this part.

Step 4: The kids then used the blow dryer to move the wax across the canvas spreading in the direction they wanted, as thin or thick as they wanted.

 Step 5: We repeated this process 3 or 4 times per student to get a deep layered effect.

Blue Skies and Mother's Day

     Last year, my first year teaching, I may have accidentally forgotten Mother's Day existed and my students may have given their moms puff paint dinosaurs for Mother's Day (that I re-purposed from their science posters)... But this year I planned ahead, and I'm so happy I did since I ended up with an unexpected addition to my class three days before the projects went home.

I came up with the idea after seeing some very ornate clay and painted glass vases on Etsy. My mentor teacher picked up the glass paint before coming out for his last visit, and his wife donated glass jars of various sizes for the kids to use.

The clay was bits and pieces from three packs of Sculpey I had left over from last year. A little really does go a long way in this project. We spent a lot of time talking about how to plan a gift for another person and how to think about what they like and what they would find beautiful before getting started. Most of my students picked spring garden scenes because their mom's loved plants. However, one did a jungle scene and another opted for an ocean scape showing the island in the Bering Sea his mom grew up on.

Each of the kids came up with their own technique for creating their scene. Some used rope coils to create their followers, filling in the gaps with pressed clay. While others layered pressed clay to create standout flowers with petals. The only time I got involved was when a student wanted to use a long coil of clay wrapped around the jar to form grass but didn't have motor skills to actually roll the coil, so she directed me on exactly how she wanted it done.

This ended up being a two day project since the clay needed to be baked onto the vases. After the clay step, I took the vases home over night and baked them on a cookie sheet at 275F for 15 minutes. The next day the kids used air dry glass paint to add in the background.

A World of Possibilities

  I started playing around with the idea of posting our projects last summer, but the time didn't feel right. I'd had a great first year teaching, but we were changing curriculum. I wanted to see where it took me and how I adapted. After eight months of taking pictures, almost starting a post, and then deleting everything I finally feel like I've reached a point where I'm ready to share what we've been working on.

  Science night was on the 17th, and this year each class was assigned a different theme with each student making a project that fit into it. 5th/6th was "simple" machines, 4th was volcanoes (with explosions every 15 minutes), 3rd grade was the egg drop, 1st grade was bubbles, and 2nd got biomes. All of the models were created in the classroom with materials we had on hand as well as things brought from home. Students also created a poster to go along with their model. Each poster had a hand colored picture of the biome, notes from the reading in a cute little animal book, and a paragraph about that biome. Students also created an imaginary animal to live in their biome and wrote in informational book on it.

The biomes all set out on Friday night.

 

The Chaparral was made using textured grass paper for the ground. It had a yarn lake, pompom pipe cleaner trees, and pompom bushes. This was perhaps the hardest biome to get started since we didn't have any books on it, and it was hard to nail down exactly what it was at first.

The Prairie had grass paper on the bottom and was covered in cut green yarn grass. The most intricate part of this biome was the animals as the builder said "everything looks weird in the prairie. Just because it's called a prairie dog doesn't mean it's a dog looking dog."

The evergreen rainforest was a very temperamental biome for the kids to make. Its owner started by making over 30 pipe cleaner trees. Some had beads on them and some were wrapped in green pipe cleaners, but none of them would stay up. He tried super glue, hot glue, a staples, but nothing would work. Finally, with 10 minutes to go we poured a good inch of bead pine needles into the bottom of the forest, and that finally managed to keep the trees upright.

The jungle biome was another very intensive biome to construct. This one was really a class effort as everyone pitched in to help make beaded trees, cut fallen leaves, and paint lace green. The trees were so heavy glue was next to pointless, so the builder hung the tree branches from the sides of the container and used those to hold the trees up.

The mountain biome was our first biome started and the first done, thankfully since the builder had to go home sick the last day of construction. It was made out of crumpled brown butcher paper painted gray/white and green. Some parts were also left brown to show exposed dirt and rocks, and a large cave was included for the bears to live in (because you can't forget those when you live in Alaska). The trees were made of brown pipe cleaners wrapped in short green pipe cleaners.

 The tundra biome was perhaps the perplexing to the builder because the tundra is constantly changing, and no two pictures looked the same. As a solution he banded it to show different parts of the tundra at different times of the year. To do this he used cotton balls for the snow and grass paper and paint for the variety of colors. He talked with the class about mixing the colors but decided this was truer to the seasons.

I had a lot of startled parents when we unveiled the finished product for this project. For two weeks the kids had been talking about taking notes, doing research, and building models; something a lot of parents didn't know what to make of. The night of the science fair every inch of every project was photographed and discussed in great detail with parents who couldn't quite believe their 2nd grader had created the display in front of them. One grandparent told me while happily snapping away with her camera her daughter hadn't thought it was possible when she'd told her their little one was doing a research project.