Making Pinwheels

 I consider making pinwheels as a requirement for childhood, along with making paper snowflakes and cootie catchers/ fortune tellers. It only takes a couple minutes and makes such a spring decoration or springboard for discussions about wind and weather.

To make, you just start with a square piece of paper: five or six inches seems to be a good size. Origami paper works really well. You fold a corner to it's opposite corner to make a triangle and then open it to do the same with the remaining two corners, making a folded X. Cut along each fold towards the center, stopping half way. Than take every other point and glue it to the center. Once the glue dries, use a thumbtack or hat pin and push it through the center of the paper into the eraser of a pencil, or into the end of a plastic straw. It's that easy!

Curly Paper Wigs

Elementary and Middle School students get a kick out of turning flat strips of paper into fun hats and wigs. Long strips of poster board can be wrapped around a child's head to measure the headband size before removing to staple. Another two straps make an X across the top to make a crown. Paper is curled by rolling each strip up in a pencil. If you pull the pencil out the side, the curl remains tight, but if you unravel it with in the pencil as you pull it out, you will have looser ringlets. Younger children will need help stapling each curl to the crown. They could choose to just line up big spiraled circles along the posterboard under structure, or try to fill in the gaps with longer curls. They may choose just one one or many colors. They may even create crimped effect by forgoing the curling technique by folding the strips back and forth for a zigzag line. Whether the goal is a hat or a wig, crimped, curled, or straight, it won't take much time or money for kids to feel happy about their wacky new look.

Pencil Cup Project from Recycled Materials

My Elementary School and Middle School students have been learning how something as flat as a piece of paper can be turned into something 3D by looping strips into links of a chain or folding pages of a book to make a sculpture, or quilling folded paper to make framed images. Making pencil cups is another project that teaches a one more technique of making flat magazine pages into a tactile exterior to a pencil cup. It is an easy, fun project that can be used for years, rather than tossed after a month of hanging on the fridge.

Students found magazine pages which they rolled into a tube, using a pencil, drizzling a strip of Elmer's glue to secure the edge. For stiff covers, rubber bands would hold it the tube in place until the glue dried, and with tight rolls a second pencil would be used to scoot the first pencil out of the tube. The each rolled tube was hot glued to a clean tin can, transforming waste from the recycled bin to something you can use to organize pens, pencils, markers, scissors, and paint brushes. Children can learn to think through the side and direction they want to roll their pages to get the nicest edge, and how to organize their colors and patterns on the can. The next rainy day at home with a bored child, consider having them make one of these to spruce up their bedroom.

Kid Made Christmas Gifts and Decorations: Glitter, Beads, and Lollipops!

A quick and easy kid-friendly craft for the holidays include glitter ornaments. I used small scraps of dark mat board as a base, but you can use card cardboard or even metal concentrated orange juice lids spray painted the color of your choice. Glue the ribbon to the back (hot glue is quick), and then draw a picture in glue on the front to cover with glitter. Stars, snowflakes, snowmen, wreaths, trees, angels, ball ornaments, candy canes, menorahs, candles, etc. Just be sure to keep it simple and only do one color at a time. Kids are amazed the first time they shake the extra glitter onto a sheet of paper and their shape is revealed.

Instead of ornaments, you might even make initials of family members to use for gift tags next year.

Pipe cleaners (Am I supposed to be calling them fuzzy craft sticks?) and beads are also easy ways to keep kids busy making ornaments. Red and white alternating beads can be bent into candy canes on half a pipe cleaner. Or white beads, with a figure eight twist in the center could help make a simple snowman shape. Green beads with bends to make a tree shape could also pass for an ornament (maybe a yellow bead in the center with a twist to make the star stay in place would help clarify).

I found that most of my young students were more interested in making beaded jewelry for their moms then ornaments, but either way, you've got a way to keep kids happy, engaged, and thinking of others.

Lollipop decorations are easy for kids to make with paper plates, and wooden dowels. It's just a matter of using markers to draw spirals, pinwheels, stripes or polka dots on the bottoms of the plates and then gluing the tops of the plates together with the dowel inside. Hot glue probably works best for this one too.

Once cellophane is wrapped around and tied with a ribbon or twist tie. the lollipop believability factor goes way up. Pop them in the ground or planters for outdoor events or in vases for indoor parties.

If you're done celebrating for this year, plan ahead for next year by grabbing on sale items now or even making special decorations to be packed up with the magic about to go into the attic until the final months of next year.

 

Relief Printing for Kids: Yarn Stamps

To me, printmaking is more than just an art standard to teach, it is a passion of mine. I have a couple of degrees in it so it feels like a big part of my identity. My yarn stamp lesson was a fun and easy way to introduce the students I love to the medium I love, just like I was introducing two good friends who I knew were going to get along really well. 

The following technique is great for young children and students like mine, who have multiple disabilities. Each student picked a shape, letter or symbol to make. They folded a rectangle cardboard in three parts so that the middle part was less than a third and the two sides would bend back and be pinched together to become the handle. We used masking tape to keep them together. 

I like thick yarn for this project. It absorbs the paint and stands out far enough to keep the paint from the cardboard. Cut a piece of yarn and glue it to the bottom of the stamp in the desired design. If you want to make a letter, make sure it is a mirrored version of itself. For example the letter "K" would turn left instead of right. Symmetrical letters such as "O", "M" and "T" will work easily, but it never hurts to look at the stamp in a mirror to make sure it will print correctly.

Once the yarn is dried, you just pour tempura or acrylic paint in a shallow plate and begin dipping and stamping. 

 Think about the whole image. Repetition and rhythm are principles of design. Try out a couple of  different colors.

My students are visually impaired, so we did some of our prints on recycled braille paper. For other prints, we added sand while the paint we'd stamped was still wet. The tactile element is so important for my students, but I wish I had used colored glue instead of paint for the stamping. Unfortunately, a lot of the sand fell off after the paint dried.