Clay Mushrooms- 2nd Grade

I'm cleaning out all of my pictures and realized that I didn't post on some of the projects I did this last year in class.  This one was such a great project that my students got to do with Sue Davies (Art Teacher from RES) during our teacher swap.

Sue created some videos for my students to observe before her visit.  It was nice for the kids to get pumped up for the upcoming project. She was kind enough to share it with you as well.  The first video show how to make a pinch pot and the second is how to create the pinch pot into a mushroom.

I got to do the finishing. I asked Mrs. Davies to use these tiny tiles I had in the Kiln room for a while.  I'm not sure where they came from... one of those 'Art Room' treasures. I placed clear glaze on the top of the mushroom before the first firing to keep these tiles in place.

Then we had the kids make a little environment for their mushroom.  I used up a lot of recycled materials in my classroom for this.  I had a bunch of uninformed container tops.  I gave them a little spray to identify the class and to give it a fresh new look.

As the students came in on the final day I had them use liquid watercolor to finish their mushrooms.  The clear glaze on the top repelled the watercolor. 

Then they started working on the environment!  This was just a small sheet of card stock. 

Some did more cartoon like backgrounds and some stayed very realistic. 

The mushrooms were then brought to me and I hot glued the background onto the container tops and on this set, we used modeling clay to keep the mushrooms in place. I found that a little hot glue works better to keep the mushroom in place and can easily be peeled off if the student wanted to. 

Placing these little gems on a cart allowed me to run these down to the homeroom teacher for the students to take their projects home.  We happened to finish them in time for Mother's Day this year. 

To see other projects we did in our teacher swap, please click here.