3 X 5 Card Mobiles

Elementary and Middle School students learned to mix paint with white to tint it and black to shade it. They painted the white sides of 3X5 cards that were later folded in half and glued to string. Fifteen strings of 5 cards each per dowel for each of the 3 dowels and you end up with 135 little color swatches dangling from the ceiling to go with the Media Center furniture. The mobiles were installed the same day as our bottle cap mosaics. It's so fun to have some color in the heart of the school.

Bottle Cap Mosaics & 3X5 Card Mobiles

 Our school's Media Center had a major face lift at the beginning of the year with book shelves rearranged, new flooring and new furniture. I figured it needed some new art too.

People from the school and community donated thousands of bottle caps for the project. We're using more water bottles since the water fountains are shut down during COVID,  and this creates a lot of waste. Our Art class wanted to make use of some of that plastic. Students submitted ideas.  

One new student, on his first day at our school, made a drawing of a face. He's totally blind, so I have him a a Tactile Doodle and we ended up using his idea to do part of a face, at least a set of eyes. A couple of other students made marker drawings of sunsets, so that's the idea we used for our second.

We spent a day playing with the caps on the board to make pictures and see how much of each color we had to work with. Later, most of the two boards were painted in the colors of the caps so we would know where to put them. Then the caps were hot glued to the surface.

I was given the 3D letters GAB to represent Georgia Academy for the Blind. We painted them before attaching the bottle caps.

Calder Art Lesson Plan

When you walk into the National Gallery in Washington D.C., one of the first things you will see is a giant black and red mobile created by Alexander (Sandy) Calder. His father, like him, was a sculpture with the name of Alexander Calder. And his grandfather, the first of the three sculptors named Alexander, immigrated from Scotland and settled in Philly where his large William Penn statue stands on city hall's dome today.

Sandy Alexander went to Paris in the 1920's, where he became known as the King of Wire for his wire circus performers and faces. These were the inspiration for my students wire face creations (above).

He later created the mobile, hanging kinetic sculptures. The term mobile was given to Calder's work by avante guard artist and friend, Marcel DuChamp.  Another art legend, Piet Mondrian, in 1930 proved to be a huge influence on Calder's work, which began to incorporate, reduced, simplified forms, and a limited pallet.

In order to help my students make the step from symmetrical balance, to asymmetrical balance, they were each required to make a mobile. This exercise requires attention to actual weight and balance (not just visual weight and balance).

Some students used only circles, while others used a variety of shapes. Some used card stock, while others used tooled foil, cardboard, or mat board. These materials were colored with markers or spray paint and attached using wire, paperclips, or pipe cleaners.