Favorite childrens mixed media pieces

In the last few years I have taught at the museum. I find and collect low cost gadgets and gizmo's to use for projects with the kids. Reusing junk that would otherwise be discarded is one of my favorite things to do. I am a huge fan of the Dollar stores, Thrift Stores, garage sales , the Recycle shop .(http://www.childcarecouncil.com/childcarecouncil146.phpon) on Blossom is awesome if you have never checked that out you really need to. They will give you a whole bag of stuff for just 5.00. I love what the kids come up with when they use their imaginations and the stories they tell as they create stuff are too good to pass up.

I have had several small group classes of 6-8 year old for Saturday and summer morning classes and we created some fabulous mixed media projects.

We created dioramas, artists books, face sculptures, outer space pieces.

For the dioramas I combined some simple childhood materials and idea. Those traditional wooden clothespins do make great dolls. We used paint,lots of hot glue,construction paper, markers, toothpicks small wooden skewers, model magic clay fabric and pipe cleaner to create these.

Two girls who worked together decided to both create beach scenes and created a overhang to combine the two in class so they could have their clothespin people interact with each other.
One of the girls realized that if she used the smaller mini clothespins she could create "babies" for her "grownup" clothespins.

For this diorama the student created a cave scene. We made stalagtites from aluminium foil rocks from model magic and other materials. I wish i had pictures of the rock band one kid made. We created a stool from sticks and a twisting medicine bottle cap. We sawed off the "legs" of the clothespin and made the drummer spin on his stool. These were all great fun. It did help that it was a small group because they was a lot of hot gluing for me to do.


The face sculptures were another huge success.... we used cardboard, model magic,paint and paper mache, hot glue, Elmer's, construction paper, pipe cleaners, raffia and, marbles for the eyes. A friend of mine donated a lot of broken old eye glasses from the eye glass store she worked at too.


The artists books we created in two ways.

The first was as altered books. A found a package of children's boards books at the dollar store that the paper torn off of easily. we removed the images and text then used a different paint treatment on each page. We created print blocks using Styrofoam tray pieces, we used bingo markers, we dipped Lego's into paint and stamped with them. We cut cardboard that had been spray painted gold and glued that into sections. I gave students the option to drill holes into their pages and put different "Funky" yarns through them.















The second way was creating an accordion fold book then using various printing techniques and paint to create images to put into the pages of ours books.

Alex's print book