Summer Teaching

Marco's collage


I just finished a very successful week of teaching summer camp.

I had come up with an idea mid year. To have kids make their own paint brushes. I had sen it in several in book I had got from the library.
I had to try it out myself. The paint brushes we made are reusable and our very in expensive materials wise.

They brushes use popsicle sticks, the large tongue depressor size and for the brush materials we used rubber bands, pom poms, gift ribbon and yarn.you sand which the brush materials between two tongue depressors and hot glue them together then use some duct tape to help reinforce the brush handle. A later and spur of the moment idea was to use the old yogurt cups we collect and the old sign making vinyl and let them decorate their own water cups to store their brushes in. Max's brush set.
The student created several 8" x10"abstract paintings on colored copy paper. I showed them several alternative techniques to appyling paint including cookie cutters, sticks, floor tile samples, using toothbrushes (whihc I bought at a dollar store just for this purpose) and, plastic several ware.We used the kids plastic silverware that has animals and tree handles etc. the raised surfaces on these make great printing tools.













Student example of painting done with floor tile sample.



Student example of painting done with plastic silverware. A fork was dragged through areas of color.

















After students created a good stack of some abstract painting we cut them to make collages and spent a lot of time looking at Eric Carle books and his online interviews.http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html

Their are some wonderful resources that he has put out. NPR has a interview with him showing slides of his work and his own webpage shares a lot of info.

We then created or own collages by cutting some of our paintings.


Sara's collage