Thursday, April 4, 2013

After Easter Art Projects

Now that Easter is over, I'm sure you've noticed that all of the Easter decorations are marked down.  If your Walmart is anything like mine, bags of Easter grass are about 10 cents and bags of plastic eggs are about $1!  And, if you're anything like me, you can't resist buying it since it's so cheap!  Here are two projects that I've done in the past that uses that discounted Easter grass! (Both of these projects were done with 2nd graders.)

When I moved into my classroom, the previous teacher had boxes of random crafting supplies, and one box had TONS of green Easter grass in it!  I really didn't want to throw out a lot of the stuff that was there, but I knew I would probably have a hard time figuring out what to use some of it for...and then it hit me!  Green Easter grass is like green lettuce!  And voila...Claes Oldenburg pop art hamburgers were born!



These took the students two class periods to do.  We used construction paper, foam, pipe cleaners, tissue paper and the Easter grass.  Crumpled brown tissue paper became the patties, and then all of the other materials were cut and manipulated into the other toppings on a burger (cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, ketchup, mustard, mayo, onions, etc.).


Since the burgers were so successful my first year, when Easter came and went last year, I decided the Easter grass wasn't a bad thing to have hanging around my classroom!  This time, I stocked up on white and yellow grass and we made pop art pizza collages!  I don't have the photos of us making these, but it was a 3 day project.




On the first day, as a class, we created a large pizza on butcher paper with markers and crayons.  I asked students to brainstorm all of the different kinds of toppings pizzas could have and they took turns covering a large pizza crust with those toppings.  I wrote each topping they came up with on the side and this was displayed in the hallway while we worked on the individual pizzas.

On the second day, students made their crust shape on Manila tag board, colored and cut it out.  Then, we painted on the red sauce and started to glue on the Easter grass as cheese.  On the third day, students added their toppings.  They were required to do at least 3 toppings, not counting the cheese.  They glued their pizza to their choice of colored tag board and then added other details, like a table cloth, silverware, etc.

The only caution with Easter grass is that it takes A LOT of glue to get the grass to stick!  Has anyone else ever used Easter grass in an art project?  What did you make with it and how did you glue the grass down?

6 comments:

  1. I love the pizzas! They look delicious! As a matter of fact, they have me thinking about cooking dinner!

    As for gluing the Easter grass, were you using Elmer's? Elmer's is a great glue, and everyone's solution to everything, but the truth is, it is best for gluing porous materials: fabric, paper, wood, yarn, etc. Plastics (buttons etc) will hold for a bit and then pop off. I would suggest getting a tacky glue. We had some that I kept in little lidded containers. The kids applied the tacky with pop sticks and then stuck the random plastic-y item into it. It holds pretty well. We used it in particular for embellishing our papier-mache projects. But the truth is, plastic stuff will always be always harder to stick.

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    1. I've been using Elmer's school glue....I know I know, yuck! It's what the previous teacher used and I still have three gallons of the stuff...I'm buying the glue all next year! The grass was hard to glue because I wasn't really sure how to go about gluing the grass...it's so small! I was having them put a blob of glue on the paper, sticking the grass into it, and then squeezing glue on top to dry...probably the best thing to actually do would be to mix the grass in a bowl of glue to coat it before gluing it down..,I just dread the mess it will probably make!

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  2. I'm the Editorial Assistant for Fun Family Crafts and I wanted to let you know that we have featured your hamburger project! You can see it here:

    http://funfamilycrafts.com/mixed-media-hamburgers/

    If you have other kid-friendly craft tutorials, we'd love it if you would submit them. If you would like to display a featured button on your site, you can grab one from the right side bar of your post above. Thanks for a wonderful project idea!

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  3. Congrats! I’m just stopping by to let you know that this post was selected as an Editor’s Pick for January over at Fun Family Crafts. :) You can see it here http://funfamilycrafts.com/editors-picks-january-2014/ Feel free to grab a special button from the post that is only for those chosen for the Editors' Pick :)

    P.S. If you aren't already submitting to Fun Family Crafts, we'd love it if you did!

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