School Collaboration, Bee a Hero

At the NAEA 14 convention in New Orleans I attended Ginger Pacer and Laura Lohmann's presentation.  They talked about their beautiful work they make with the kids but one thing that really rang in my head was the fact that they create artwork at the end of the year to hang throughout the summer and welcome students in the fall.

I have a big bulletin board that I'm asked to cover in the fall but it's used over the summer by the summer child care group.  I still wanted to get the students involved with decorating for the next fall so this is what we did the last three weeks of school in most classes. I had the students prepare paper, add to the printed paper, cut and design for our theme next year.

I used the presented methods of group collaboration that Laura and Ginger presented on.  Painting, printing, and giving texture to the tpages.  It was fun to watch the different types of artist... gentle, rough, and some in between.

Students were also asked to help with drawing.  When given a choice I was shocked to see that about half the class chose to stay away from painting and preferred to color instead.  Grant it, I was letting them use sharpies... for some reason, they feel like they are doing something bad in Kindergarten when they use permanent markers.  I hear, 'My mom/dad says I can't use these at home'.  Fair enough... but I'll let you use them in art class.

I also had kids working on dark paper with printing and markers with a requested design as you see below. 

One of my favorite parts of this giant project was asking some students to create flowers and leaves.  It's so fun to see students let go and explore with paints. 

Finally, there was some lettering involved.  I taped off the letters needed and had the students paint/print.  We painted the outside black.

Here is what we ended up with, all prepped and ready to be hung next year... Our theme is 'Bee a Hero'.  There will be several bees, flowers, and leaves around these letters, There are also several hexagons that will fill the negative space. I simply can't wait to see it all finished up... but for now, it lays in my back room, awaiting its reveal.