“This… is art!”

The Rose and Lavender groups have been hard at work in the Studio on wooden sculptures. Friends spent a week exploring wooden shapes and trying to figure out which pieces worked together and which didn’t.  Children noticed that round shapes had a hard time balancing on flat shapes, but if both sides were flat, they could easily stick together.  Next, friends used wet glue to adhere their pieces to create one or more sculptures!

Eli: I can mix the glue.  I can spread the glue.

Jax: Wow, so cool.  See, it can stand up!

Konone: I don’t know what I made!

Christian: The ring and the ball look like a planet from outer space!

Bennett: I’m going to make a little kid.  It’s my sister.  No, no, I made a dinosaur with a spike on the back!

Naomi: This piece looks like a bracelet!

Kavalli: Whewwwwww, the ball rolls.

Cathy: I balanced it!

Isabella: Wood feels cold, smooth and hard.

The following week, friends were excited to see that their sculptures were dry!  Children used liquid watercolors to paint their wooden sculptures.

Cathy: My sculpture looks like Mars.

Darby: This… is art!

Christian: My 3 headed monster!  I missed him!  I’m an artist because if someone is an artist, they just paint their sculptures.  Yep, I’m correct.  I’m an artist because I have to make him detailed.  It’s so crazy, the paint is drying so fast!

Isabella: Victor, yours balanced!

Siah: I’m painting it gentle so it wont break.

Jariel: The paint dried.  It dried fast.

Kai: Look at me.  I did this.

This week, friends worked on adding collage materials to our sculptures.  Children collected feathers, buttons, googly eyes and other found materials from the Studio to add to their sculptures.

Kavalli: It’s an experiment.  An eyeball fox man.

Naomi: Cathy, look! This material is shiny.  It can be the chocolate in the cookie.

Phoenix: The glue is rainbow.

Siah: A star! A sprinkle star! So pretty.

Jariel: Mamma mia, stop sticking to me, you feather.

“I have to study this!” (Observational Drawing)

We’ve been working on these wooden sculptures for a little over a month, and friends were excited to illustrate all of their hard work (and then take their sculptures home!)

“You don’t go to the Art Studio to get a haircut, you go there to make your art!”

Over the last week and a half, friends have been practicing with scissors and different types of adhesives.  We began by talking about materials that were appropriate to cut with scissors, as well as materials that aren’t ok to cut with scissors.  Children were very excited to finally have scissors available in the Studio and practiced how to use them correctly and safely.

Luke: We don’t cut houses because we need them to live in.  Scissors do “open and close” like this.

Daniel: If you cut the table, the legs will break off and you’ll need a new table.

Sylvie: Ms.Cookie cut my hair but we do not cut our own hair or our friends hair.

Sasha: You don’t cut your hair with scissors.  You go to my mom’s salon for a haircut.

Garumma: When I was a baby, I cut my finger.  I didn’t know how to use scissors.

Zavier: I open them.  Then I close them.  Clip, clap, clip, clap, scissors!

Zuri:  Cutting is like magic.  If you snip around the paper, it’s like a hula skirt.

Yonathan: You don’t go to the Art Studio to get a haircut, you go there to make your art.

Logan: We should call squeeze scissors squeezers!

Once friends had lots of shapes of paper, they began assembling a collage.  Children worked with wet glue, glue sticks, tape and staplers as they experimented with adhering tissue paper, foil and card stock to construction paper.

Mouhammadou: It’s easy to make a rectangle.  Scissors are good at that.

Justin: I’m gluing it so I can put it all back together.

Vivian: This is going to be a bowtie.

Ronan: Glue sticks look like lipstick.

Miles: I cut this shape and it looks like a shoe.

Alberto: The foil sounds like metal.  I can squish the metal.

Jariel: Tissue paper like “achoo, achoo!”

Kofi: The wet glue looks like vanilla frosting.

Andres: Put it there, see it perfect.  Sure, it perfect.

This week, we also introduced the light table!  Children had the opportunity to work at the light table if there was time after they were finished collaging.  Videos to come of some of the work done at this area over the course of the week 🙂

Finally, aside from a day of rain, it was a very sunny week in the Studio!  Friends continued to discover new prisms and crystals that were casting rainbows all over the classroom.

“The hot glue dried so it’s cold glue again.”

Tuesday groups are in the final phase of their paper mache masks/hats!  Friends were excited to finish these up, especially because it involved lots of fun collage materials, Beautiful Junk, glitter and… the introduction of a hot glue gun (which requires adult supervision!)  Here are some photos from today’s fun!

Jasper: You need adult supervision with the hot glue.  You plug it in the wall and it gets hot and makes heavy things stick.

Owen: Hot glue is very dangerous, you have to be careful.  The hot glue dried so it’s cold glue again.

Noah: Let’s blow on the hot glue so it gets cold.

This morning, we found a new (and very exciting) material in the Beautiful Junk containers.  This deco flex tubing transformed throughout the day from water slides for googly eyes, to shiny slimy worms.  Thanks Jenn Lauchlan for sharing these with us… I’ve already placed an order for more of this fun material!

Chris: Sprinkles are so sprinkly.

Jasmine: An alien with lots of antennas.

AJ: Mine has a visor.  It keeps things in outer space from getting in your eyes.

“This is the messiest project ever!”

The Tuesday art groups began working with paper mache today!  Many children that were Pre-K 3’s last year have been asking when we would be working with paper mache and were so excited to teach new friends about the messy technique.  This is one of my favorite techniques to teach because there are endless possibilities of what you can create using paper mache.  Children always surprise me with the creative things that they build and I can’t wait to see how these turn out.

Setting up for today… balloons are everywhere!

 Kofi: I got newspaper with the United States on it.

 Betsabe: Sticky like bubble gum!

Gabby: The boy on this newspaper looks famous.  I stuck the famous boy to my balloon!

AJ: Finally… paper mache!  Can I make a mask?  Or a hat?  Or just anything else that I want?