End of the Year Paper Sculptures

The last few weeks of the school year are in full swing. All 400ish portfolios are handed back which means one day-no grade-"Take it with you please!"-projects are happening all over the place.

THIS is my favorite. Any class that was caught up and had a day or so left with me are making these wicked awesome paper sculptures. HUGE thanks to the ever brilliant shine brite zamorano for the inspiration via this post from pinterest.

These were done with a variety of K-4 classes and were incredibly open ended. I made the video below (Sorry I don't do sound!) to show them some of the basics and just "required" them to do two pieces of paper as the base. The two paper rule was to give it a little weight so they wouldn't lift when they started gluing. Everything else they did was up to them. Most students went abstract but I had a few do playgrounds, roller coasters, houses, and masks.

The only two negatives were the prep of cutting all the paper and having K & 1-ers wanting to do the cylinder and having difficulty gluing it down with enough glue to keep it on. There was a lot of end of the world tears when that happened.

My FAVORITE thing that happened was no one asking to do free art in my 3 & 4 classes because they were so completely engaged (which says a lot for the last 3 weeks of school).

HIGHLY recommend this as an end of the year project, if you have any paper left that is!

Be right back.

I'm into the end of the year chaotic time so it will be three weeks before I post any projects or lessons but here are three things I'm working on for the end of the year/last day of art!

Apples to Art:

This is still in the prototype phase right now and just starting to come together. My plan is to show an artwork to students either legitimate like from art history or something random from the internet that is ridiculous. Then with each image, ask them a questions like "What are these people talking about?" "Why is that cat in that box?" using this awesome online tool called Poll Everywhere. Students will be grouped with chromebooks and I will have them submit answers anonymously and I will pick my favorite and that team gets a point. Like Apples to Apples! Check out Poll Everywhere below! Not 100% free but I can do all the basics without any cost!

Art Mad Libs:

Again in prototype phase but I can't see this going wrong. I'll set up basic one or two sentence mad libs and have students give me words and then the rest of the class draws it in a certain amount of time. One school I will be doing it on a smartboard we just got in the library that I have access too and the other school we will be just using the whiteboard. TOTALLY FREE!

Plickers:

I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS. And, it is totally ready to go with the exception of that when I do it with the first class it will be the first time trying it. I knew I wanted to do an end of the year survey with students asking how they liked each project but knew I would need a visual for each project and dreaded adding up all the scores myself. And then I saw this on an art of ed post about assessment.

PLICKERS! I'm set up to do it with K-6 for the last class they have art....I have no doubt that 6th graders can figure it out but Kindergarten with definitely be interesting!

The video isn't from them but they have great info on how it works on their site. I'm losing my mind over how cool this is and all the ways I can implement it next year. Just you wait and see, I promise you will be the first to hear about it (besides like every staff member I have ran into this week). Best thing is 100 PERCENT FREE.

Good luck with the end of the year! Be right back when I have regained my sanity!