Red Hot

The kiln was done firing the students' glazed pieces right after school today.* I've told them how hot it gets and that it turns red, but it's not something that I can show them. That is until I took a super quick picture before getting burned! They're going to love seeing the picture :)

This was my third attempt to take a picture. The first one, it was too hot to hold open and by the time I took the picture, I had to close the lid, so the picture is actually of the outside of the kiln, oops :) I used the sleeve of my coat doubled in order to touch the small metal handle on the lid. The heat inside just blasted out though and my coat and I were both super hot for several minutes after taking the final picture.


*The kiln had shut off, but was still super hot, about 1800*F! The last time I fired ceramics, the kiln was turned on around 8 AM and emptied around 7:30 AM the next day. The ceramics were still a little warm (easily handle-able though). Today's first graders were quite intrigued!

Student Christmas Trees

My students have been working on Christmas crafts during art this last unit. We've made snowflakes (the traditional fold into a triangle, cut, then open to see what happened), Christmas cards, and Christmas trees. I saw a little girl's shirt that had this basic design in ribbon and decided to try it out in paper! The students loved it! It took most students about 45 minutes to an hour (over a two day period).

This is a first or second grade example, I'm not sure which, beside the inspiration.

Supplies needed:

Black piece of 9" x 12" construction paper

Green piece of 9" x 12" construction paper

Brown piece of construction paper: 1" x 2" or 2" x 2"

glue

Any extra pieces of paper/decoration you may want to add. A few of my older students added little ornaments, snow (white crayon), presents, etc.

Fold the green paper in half. Cut 1"-2" strips of paper along the fold (my pieces were quite irregular - no measuring involved and I told the students not to worry about exactness either, when have you seen a natural tree that was exact? Not very often!). Unfold the strips of paper and cut them along the fold.

You will need 10 of the half pieces. Fold each of these into a loop and adhere the ends together with a very small amount of glue and hold tight for a few seconds (my little ones count to 20). Then glue them in rows as shown in the picture. The star is just two triangles put together. I figured this would be the easiest for the students to create. The trunk is a piece about 1" x 2" or 2" x 2" brown construction paper.

Have fun!

Trees - Inspired by Liz Tran

Today, the 3rd and 4th graders drew their trees and the 1st and 2nd graders colored the drawings they made yesterday.

They're awesome! Take a look for yourself:

2nd grader - Liz Tran named her paintings. The students were encouraged to do the same, although they did not have to. This student named her art work "happy, happy, happy, happy, happy" Love it!

2nd grader - although difficult to see, this student was the first one who had patterns within the stripes. He did an awesome job recreating this feature. The circles inside circles represent a cloud :)

2nd grader - this one is a great example of the many types of circles found in several of the tree paintings we viewed.

1st grader - great example of patterns within the stripes!

1st grader - I love all the dots in this one. It reminds me of a tropical paradise somewhere :)

1st grader - Love the colors in this one :)

1st grader - Great patterns in the stripes and a fabulous background!

1st grader - another great example of patterns within the stripes. The other students were highly impressed with this version. They kept complimenting the student on a job well done. It was super cute!

Movember = Mustaches

My students and I made mustaches for Movember today :)

One of my first graders loved her mustache so much that she kept holding it up to her lip and saying mustache over and over again in a funny little accent, so funny! After telling her dad about it the next day, he told me that she had played with it all the way home in the car and all evening at home! He was quite amused by it too :)

Here are some images I printed for them to use (images found on Google images):

 

This is the one that I printed and cut out to use as the right size. Then I used some of the following ideas and others that I can't find now along with the sizing of the first one (width-wise). The students LOVED them!

At the end, I connected pipe cleaners as a stick so the students could hold them up to their faces. After some trial and error, I found that if you cut a small piece of paper and wrapped and glue it around the pipe cleaner, then glue the paper to the paper, it's much easier and stays in place faster. Pipe cleaners don't like to be glued to things!

Here's a simple step by step of how I eventually decided to apply the pipe cleaners/sticks:

The Class Pumpkin Patch

So, I really meant to bring/find in order to bring my camera to school, but it didn't happen. Again. Anyway, the students LOVED making these! So much so that yesterday, they requested that it be available during Fun Friday! That's huge! Of course I made that happen :)

We used construction paper to make ours. The ever amazing copy aide cut all of the strips for us! She's awesome!!

During the first class, 3rd grade, I showed the students how to lay out the strips for gluing, but didn't show them how to glue. Most of them were able to manage without being shown, but a significant number of students would've been less frustrated with the process if I had shown them exactly what to do.

Arming myself with the knowledge gleaned from the first class, I showed the next class a full tutorial. Viola! They were super successful! Some of them even made 3 or four pumpkins in the time it took the last class to make one pumpkin! Amazing!

Want to know the secret? A very, very small amount of glue! Just a small dot and then squeeze the segments together. If there's too much glue, then the paper can't absorb it and the paper slips instead of sticks.

A few students also discovered, somewhat accidentally, that if the strips of paper are laid across each other instead of end-to-end, the pumpkin turns out much smaller and SUPER cute! After the first happy accident, I actually told the rest of my students that they had two options instead of the one I originally planned :)

After making the main pumpkin by gluing the strips of paper directly to the ends of the other papers (no circle as in the picture although that would've been cute), we added a brown stem folded and glued as shown and some students also added a little, green pumpkin leaf. I found the image of a pumpkin leaf via a JoAnn Fabrics pumpkin table runner tutorial (forgot the link, sorry!) that I made into card stock template.

Here's a picture of one of the inspiration pumpkins and the link to her blog:

www.craftaholicsanonymous.net

Perhaps Tuesday, I will remember my camera and we will make ghosts and pumpkins once again.