Spring Garden Collaborative Paper Mural!

I'm so excited to show you what I've been working on with the students at Oakridge Elementary!! I've been meeting with a group of about 20 K-3 students, twice a week after school. It's considered their "Art Club".  It's really nice... they have a grant to help them bring in Lane Arts Council Teaching Artists (me) all the time, so they're constantly rotating and learning different techniques and materials. Pretty neat for such a rural school that might not get that kind of stuff otherwise. Anyway, onto the project! 

Collaborative paper murals do a lot of good for kids.  It's great to get kids working on their own pieces, and then "give them up" to be a part of a much bigger work of art. So they get to be creative and work independently, and then they get to work as a team to put it all together as a whole. Here's what we did:

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Day 1: We made vegetables and flowers using oil pastel and watercolors over them (same thing as a crayon resist technique).

Day 2: We split into teams and some tables made dirt, some made clouds, some made flower stems and grass, some made a sun. We took turns gluing things onto the blue butcher paper (I didn't do any of that, they got to make all the choices together, by communicating with each other - key!)

Day 3: We did step-by-step drawing together to make a bumblebee, hummingbird, and butterfly. Each student made one of each, then we glued these on, too. 

This project is PERFECT for springtime lessons about pollination!!! Half of our mural was a veggie garden, half a flower garden. We talked about the importance of the pollinators to both sides. This is really really worth the time and effort. Kids love it, it teaches science concepts, teamwork and communication, and also independent work and creativity. Have fun!!

before we added pollinators....

gluing pieces on...

Each student made one of each kind of pollinator!

 End Results:

Collaborative Mural Project for Kids

One of the things I've learned lately about teaching, is that the better I lay out expectations FIRST, the better everything goes afterwards with students.  It sounds obvious, but it's so key.  Anyway, one of my expectations when doing a school-wide mural with kids, is TEAMWORK and COLLABORATION. Those are the biggies.  Kids are expected to work together on the mural, and respect each other's ideas and contributions, for it all to come together. They might not get to paint the "coolest" or "best" part, or at least not on their own.  It's everyone contributing to the whole, that makes it look nice in the end. 

So to drive this point home, this was the first project I did with my most recent group of students. A collaborative mural....but in paper!  This school's mission is about these 5 "Heart Skills", as they call them: Teamwork, Empathy, Honor, Accountability and Respect.  Here's how we did this:

1.) First day: I had every student k-5 draw their self portrait on a 4.5 x 4.5" square. 

2.) After that, if kids finished early, they were allowed to go over to our big butcher paper and paint designs with tempera around the words I had written in black paint. 

3.) I glued every kid's self portrait down around the words.  The kid's designs and colors peek through as the background.  

** If I were to do this over again, I would have made it an even bigger piece of paper so that we could spread the portraits out a little more, and see more of the painting underneath.

This is SO worth it to do with kids.  This is getting them ready to work TOGETHER, and turns out ridiculously cute and awesome. Also, nice enough to laminate or mount and hang somewhere as a mural in it's own right!

Happy paper mural-ing!

Corie