Yesterday at Crafting A Future I welcomed several groups of girls and a group of boys into my home for some more art lessons, and we had a great time! With the 1st , 2nd and 3rd grade girls we made woven elipses from recycled cardboard, and then turned those into fish, (for the month of Adar) butterflies, a clown and even a cute Purim cat.
I love this twist on the classic paper weaving that many of use learned in kindergarten, though was totally new to most of these girls, and some of them struggled to actually get the idea, which made me realize how very badly they need these weekly lessons!
While I generally do not want to help the students too much, the first graders who made these butterflies needed my help in drawing and cutting the wings. I was so happy to see that the butterfly on the right was decorated with doodled shapes that I had shown the girls last week!
And look at this sweet little clown, which will look great hanging on this little student's wall, especially since her older sister made an even bigger clown in my class for older girls.
How To Make Woven Paper Strip Animals And Clowns And Learn A Little Bit About Design:
As with my first lesson last week, and hopefully all those that follow, I am not just doing crafts with the kids, I'm also talking to the about color, design, and the whys and hows of art and craft. This week each child started with a blank piece of paper, and I asked them to draw an ellipse on the paper. Then I asked them if anyone knew how we could make a fish from the ellipse shape. They seemed a bit confused, so I asked them to add fins, a tail and a mouth and eyes to their ellipse to make it into a fish. The idea being that then we would translate our drawings into large fish using the cardboard ellipse that I had prepared for them with pre-cut slits.
I have to be honest, the idea of design and sketching was only really understood 100% by one student, whose fish, seen at the top of the post really is a large version of her sketch!
The kids cut their own strips of paper, and wove the strips through the slits. Then something very interesting happened, which was that most of the girls just couldn't stretch their imagination to make a fish from this shape, even though we had drawn it on paper, so I gave them the option of making anything, and that is how our cat, butterflies, and clown came to be.
And as you can see, those who were able to complete the project went home just as happy as can be! A few students (1st graders) got so wrapped up in writing me notes on their fish drawings and singing and screaming that they forgot the reason why we were having the class and weren't able to finish this project within the alotted time. I'm loving this experience of getting to know all the children's personalities, and I see that with this spirited group its going to take some serious work on my part to make sure that we spend our time creating and not running around and screaming, sigh.
