Tuesday, March 5, 2013

twistin and turnin.

This has been a fun one:)

The 4th grade classes needed a little extra time on their Shane Devries landscapes, so I wanted to do a low stress, high success project with the shorter time I had left this week.

Thank you Ms. Novak over at Organized Chaos! I recently came across a project she did with her students a while back and thought it would fit the bill perfectly. The project is to make a paper sculpture with warm and cool colors, one long cut, twist and turn the paper to create interesting loops and pop outs, and glue those pieces together.

I shared Ms. Novak's blog post and examples of her students' work with each class. I did this while some were finishing up with their previous project. My students had a hard time believing that "little" 2nd graders actually made the stunning examples they were looking at:)

I also very quickly shared a couple sculptures that Frank Stella made, so they could see how a "bigger" artist used the same concept of twisting and turning a shape to make something new and interesting.



When the students were ready to start, I shared 3 photos of my sample, so they could see how they would add warm colors to one side of a sheet of paper and cool colors to the other. I also showed them a photo of my continuous line on the warm side. With the last one, I emphasized that the line started on an edge and ended on a different spot inside the square and that no 2 parts of the line should touch each other.






Adding the warms and cools to the paper was simple enough. When it came to adding the continuous line,that's when some of the students had a little difficulty. Some made completely closed shapes, some made their line to simple. These students were able to modify their designs before cutting after discussing the issue with me.

I then modeled how they should "play" with their cut pieces to find interesting solutions to their sculpture problem. Once they tried out a few ways to shape it, they could then add glue to make parts stick to each other. Echoing the sentiments of Ms. Novak, I emphasized to the students that they couldn't really go wrong with this problem. As long as the sculpture didn't end up flat like a piece of paper, they were creating a 3d form.










4 comments:

  1. These are lovely, and your instructions are very clear, thanks so much :)Elizabeth

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  2. Wahoo!!!! Great job kiddos! I am so excited to see these. Thanks for linking back to my blog.

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  3. Excellent idea. I'm keen to try this. Thanks.

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