Monday, January 28, 2013

Construction Paper Play

Every week I have the opportunity to teach a children's art class. Right now, there are only 2 students (Grade 1 & 3) which is perfectly fine with me because that just means I'm able to try a wider variety of lessons since materials for two students wouldn't cost so much.

A recent project I did with them was using construction paper to create 3D sculptures. This was inspired from one of my favourite art teacher blogs, Organized Chaos. In my lesson, I gave the students 5 minutes to draw with markers as many kinds of lines as possible. From these drawings, we talked about the variety of lines (wavy, zigzag, dotted, straight, diagonal, curly, swirly, etc). 

 
Using these drawings as our inspiration, we constructed 3D lines using strips of construction paper. My students loved this idea and had a whole lot of fun constructing a "park" or "skateboard park."



After the success of this lesson, I decided to try it on my almost 3 yr old daughter by just using the strips of paper to make a "park". She seemed to somewhat enjoy it but it required a lot more help in gluing the 3D parts and folding (which meant frustration for my daughter). I would say perhaps this activity might be best left for at least 3.5 year olds but it's worth a try if you're keen on this idea. 


I also found that my husband started making one when he had some father-daughter time :)


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