2nd Grade: Greek Mosaics

Well, I missed "throwback Thursday" but I'll post these today anyhow.  These mosaics were from way back when I had a substitute for my maternity leave.  I asked her to do it in conjunction with the 2nd grade NYS Listening & Learning strand about Ancient Greek civilizations.  This project wasn't exactly executed the way that I would have handled it, but a few of the projects did turn out decent.

I had my substitute use Roylco's Mosaic Squares, something I had purchased a few years back through the Extended Day grant and have never used.  I can't find the link to the sticky ones, but those are actually the ones that were used for this, not the paper squares.  Anyways, I have decided that if I do this project again, I will have the students cut up construction paper into random geometric shapes to fill in their spaces.  I had encouraged her to have the students cut the stickers in half to fit into smaller spaces, but no one did.  In other words, I plan on essentially combining this project with the geometric and organic shape collages that my 2nd graders did the year before.

Symmetrical Butterflies

For our last 1st grade project, I wanted to do butterflies (which matched up with what they were learning in class), but I ended up running out of time to do an Eric Carle style painted butterfly with texture, similar to this idea on Pinterest.  I had to drastically shorten this project in order to complete it before the end of the year, so I came up with this instead.

I have a variety of different shaped butterfly patterns so students picked which shape they wanted and traced it on white tag board.  They colored the body on the butterfly and then cut it out.

For the next step, we talked about symmetry on butterflies.  I passed out the mosaic stickers I have (used previously on a 6th grade Mexican Folk Art Mirrors) and had the students create a symmetrical design on the wings using the stickers.  All of this took one class period.

The second class, students had to use crayons to finish coloring their butterfly.  This was definitely a quick project but I'd say a majority of the students really understood about basic symmetry at the end!