Celebrating Art Contest: Honorable Mention!

Woohoo!  I'm excited to post that one of my student's artwork was chosen as an honorable mention for the K-3 grade level category for the Fall Celebrating Art contest!  Her Mondrian Collage can be seen on page 7 of the K-3 category on the Celebrating Art Facebook page.  While I'm a little sad that I didn't have a student artwork chosen to be a top-10 winner, I'm excited to know that I had one chosen for an honorable mention!  That means her and I were close! ;)  I had about 22 students accepted to be published in this book, so that means I'll get a free hardcover copy.  Super excited!

Cherry Blossom Branches

Here are some of our finished cherry blossom branches from my Kindergarten cherry blossom unit.  Two of my kinder classes have finished while one more class will finish when we return from February break (a snow day threw off our schedule!). 

This was the first time the kinders painted with watercolor paint in my art room with me and I think they did pretty well!  I really love how the sky turned out behind the branches...gives the illusion of clouds!  I also the flowers this year...instead of doing just straight pink, crumpled tissue paper, I handed out a variety of Valentine colors and had students create an actual flower using multiple pieces of tissue paper (center a different color than the petals).

I am, however, still a little bit partial to the 1st grade cherry blossom trees I did last year...I'm thinking I'm going to have to mesh these two projects together next year!  (Or, maybe I'll take a break from cherry blossom trees...who knows!?)

Art Club Fundraising

Now that we are done with our mural, it's time for my art club to start working on making some money for their field trip at the end of the year!  When I was growing up, I was fascinated with boondoggle.  Don't know what boondoggle is?  How about plastic lacing...or gimp?  My dad and my grandma taught me how to make key chains and I used to make them and sell them on the bus when I was in elementary school!

When I started my art club, I knew that the previous teacher used to do bake sales to raise money for a field trip.  To me, that's not very artistic (especially since parents made the stuff to sell!), plus it's so hard to have a bake sale in NYS now because of health code stuff.  If it's not prepared in a school kitchen, you can't sell it anymore!  We charge anywhere from 25 cents (for the short, zipper pulls...the Kinders like buying these and can afford them) to $2.50 for the bracelets below.

If you don't know about boondoggle, or you need brushing up on it, check out the Boondoggle Man website.  His site is AWESOME.  He has videos as well as step-by-step pictures for just about EVERY boondoggle stitch possible.

Here are the items I'll be teaching my kids how to make on Wednesday when we get back from break.  They've been hounding me to learn how to do this, but it takes a bit to teach these and we needed to finish the mural.

The bottle tab bracelets are really popular bracelets.  They're so fun to make because you can change up the color of the laces and/or the color of the tabs if you have enough!  One of the teachers at my school brought me TWO gallon coffee cans filled with tabs of all sorts of different colors!

There are lots of different ways to make these bracelets.  I based my pattern off of a bracelet my brother got from a friend.  A lot of times people make a single layer of tabs, but these can actually hurt to wear because the rough side of the tab is against the skin.  I use two layers of tabs, back to back and off set just a bit.  When school starts back up and I have access to my tabs and boondoggle, I post a tutorial!

These are the other types of bracelets that are pretty popular.  These cuff bracelets use a thin piece of metal, usually aluminum strips.  You can find lots of tutorials on how to make these in boondoggle books from Michaels or JoAnns (that's where I got all these patterns from).

For my last share of this post, I will share my boondoggle cheat sheet that I have made to send home with my students.  Once they get the basic stitches down (box, brick wall, spiral and zig zag), I send them home with sheet.  These all came from the Boondoggle Man website.  I simplified the directions and added a picture so that the students can do the fancy key chains at home without me.  The fishy/ribbon is a very popular key chain.  Last year we made about 30 of these, charged $2 for them and then donated the money to one of the caner walks that a teacher was participating in.