Outer Space

A painting made by a 1st grader in art club... 

"It's in space and the space ship is passing the meteor and it's close to it but it doesn't hit it".

Creative clay

Here are some clay creations from Art Club last week. This is one student's family, complete with pets and dinner:

 And here is a hanging ornament with a neat geometric texture:

Beautiful work, as always.

A tower as big as Liz!

Their goal was to make a Kapla block tower as tall as me, and look! Mission accomplished.

(this tower has been brought to you by Peter and Brady)

A Bracelet Business

I wrapped pipe cleaners in yarn and braided them together to make these funky bracelets as a demo for an activity this afternoon. The kids at afterschool got totally into making them, and now have big plans to have a "business" selling them at recess!

Beautiful Bowls!

Here are the finished bowls the kids made in Art Club. Each one is unique and full of personality. I love the creative ways they kids mixed the materials!

Proud Puzzle-doers

Paper Mache Bowls

Today in art club we worked on the paper mache bowls we started last week. Now that they are hard and sturdy, they can be decorated in lots of ways, using all different materials...

Here are some shots of the decorating process:

Look at this happy face!

Next week, when the bowls are all dry, I'll snap some photos of the finished products (prepare to be impressed). Meanwhile, if you want to make our own paper mache bowl, I put together some directions after I taught a bowl-making workshop a few years ago in Chicago - you can find them right here.

Magic Snowflakes

We made delicate snowflakes out of coffee filters today, then painted them with watercolor.

So pretty! Can you spot the four "sharks" in this one?

CPSFC gives a hoot!

During their regular school day, the kids have been learning about recycling, composting, and reusing the things that many people just throw away. We've been integrating this learning into the after school program by doing lots of crafts with recycled materials, like these toilet paper tube owls (and one elephant)!

thankful

Some things my group was thankful for:
"...my life"
"...my friends at school"
"...sisters"
"...the computer"
"...really good teachers"
"...all good things"
"...potato pancakes and chard pie"

I'm pretty sure they were also thankful for the yummy caramel apples Amy made for everyone!

The "Rainbow Fence Project" - Community Beautification with Young Artists

This "rainbow fence project" is the culmination of an ongoing community art project I led in afterschool this semester. The city park behind the school is... unpretty. So, we did a lot of brainstorming about ways to make it lovelier (some more of those ideas will hopefully come to life as well!). Once we settled on this idea, the first step was to get fabric donated, then to sort through the bags of donated fabric and cut it all into strips. Once all the fabric was cut, we sorted the strips into bags by color. After that, we did some planning sketches and scouted the park to chose the panel of chain link fence we would beautify. Then we finally began installation! Here are some photos of getting started...

The rainbow spread quickly with so many little hands installing it!

We got beautiful 75 degree weather on installation day!

We worked all afternoon...

And the finished piece is totally rad.

The kids want to do more projects like this, and came up with a name for their new community art group - they are calling themselves "PEACE" - an acronym for Project for the Enrichment of Arts in the Community Environment. Check out the vocabulary on these kids! The kids took most of the photos, too. I'm so proud.