Pop-Up Garden

I was inspired by Tracy Boberg Nichols who has a IG account called... @tracynicholsartclass. She did a pop-up garden with her students for Mother's Day 2021. I had to do it with my students as well. I have asked Tracy if she would mind if I shared the video I made off from her inspiration with others and she is happy to share!! So here is the video I created with my students. 

Here are the lessons I learned from teaching this pop-up garden 10 times to different sections. 

1) At first I asked students to create flowers on a half of sheet of paper. The problem was some flowers got too big and some too small. The solution was to create a template. This was helpful for students. I had students follow along with me using the following video. We did flowers 1-4 together to give students confidence. Then they could do 3 flowers on their own and two 'things' that fly in the garden (birds, bugs, butterflies... ). The flowers were created on Day 1 of this project. 

Many classes had some time after making the flowers. If that happened we used scrap paper to try to make the pop up portion of the cards. They could practice as many times as they wanted. If it was hard, they could practice over the week until the next class period. 

2) On day two, I handed the blue paper to the students as they entered the room. We folded the paper together and placed their name a table number onto the art. This was perfect for students to be successful by folding the paper same direction. They came to the carpet for the next instruction.

3) I showed students how to create 3 stems... I found this to be the 'magic' number of stems to not be too crowded and to allow students to be successful. This was also a good number that if students 'accidentally' added one more... it was OK. 

After the cuts as shown in the video I would remind students to "Hold the fold" then "Pull and Press". This seemed to help them quite a bit. 

4) After finishing this job I showed them (back on the carpet) how to glue the two together (the blue and green papers) and then showed them the portion of the video that shows cutting and glueing the flowers on... VERY short clip. For some students, this to take them the whole time... some finished up early. 

5) I made an optional instruction for students who were ready to challenge themselves or ready to move on. I showed them how to create a 'spring' with two strips of paper (as shown int he video). This was perfect for some to have as an option but if others were behind, perhaps with cutting or something else, they just kept working with the original steps.

This was a perfect end of the year activity but I will probably do it in April next year as Tracy did. I also think this would be a wonderful summer project for students to do as well.