An unrelated lesson I did with the same class. This is my demo example. Kids cut parts of the paper and make them into 3-dimensional structures
In my Spectra Art class, the 2nd grade students created a collage to add to the tree paintings we did last week.
My mind is constantly blown away by their amazing creativity and artwork, and today was still one of the most exciting days to see their work.
We had a variety of salvaged papers and cardboards, strings, and sticks to work with, all in the brown-family, except for the dyed toothpicks that the art education office had kept for decades(They were thin rectangular sticks that dyed with colors of the rainbow — I wonder if they’re still available in stores?). I showed them how to glue down materials, and how to make three dimensional shapes out of flat pieces of paper.
Without pictures, it’s hard to explain why the student projects are great, but I love teaching art to a classroom full of kids, because you end up with 20 different versions of a tree house at the end of class. Teach two classes, and we have 40 different versions, all of which are great, or interesting at the least.
Of course, how easy it would be if teaching art were only about art. It’s not — it’s also about communicating to 7-year olds in their language and knowing what they can do and can’t do, technically. The hardest part for me is in getting over small issues of individual students, so I can manage the whole class. The hour was filling up, and I couldn’t bear to tell the children to stop everything that they were doing(about 1/3 of the class was still working). Ah, my weakness. So, the all-powerful, experienced classroom teacher(it is her class, and I go in there to teach art regularly) finally took command with her charisma, and in a micro-second, the kids were scrambling to clean their things up.
