Weaving Crocodiles

First grade has been working on a project that has many, many steps and took just as many class periods to finish. Now they are finally complete and the results are totally worth the wait. To finish up our Ancient Egyptian theme students have been making weaving crocodiles. The idea for this project came from art teacher Cassie Stephens. You can check out her blog here.

First students learned about the ancient art of weaving, how it is done, what it could be used for etc. We also learned Ancient Egyptians used weaving all the time! Students decorated their strips of paper with patterns and designs cut out from colored construction paper. After the strips were decorated students assembled the weaving.

After the weaving was finally complete, which was a big project all on its own we began to create the different body parts to turn our weaving's into crocodiles. Students cut out tails, which we stamped with green paint and cardboard. We also created the crocodiles mouth, which we made into puppet mouths. This added an extra day to the lesson and was a tad difficult but the students love the fact that they can make their crocodiles mouth open and close.

Op Art Weavings

So I'd like to start off this post by letting everyone know I have done it! I have finally solved the mystery of where all the art supplies disappear to. Well not all the art supplies but the glue sticks at least. Which while I'm on the topic of glue sticks let me say that I love how they are NOT elmer's glue, thus being much cleaner, but I loath how quickly my kiddies find ways of destroying them. But back to the case of the missing glue sticks. Check out where all mine have been sneaking off to...

Do you see it? . . . . . . . . Here I'll zoom ya in.

There you are! This is the kind of thing that makes me laugh and sigh all at once. Ah well, onto some art work.

My second graders recently finished an op art weaving project. First we learned how to weave paper, but instead of making it all straight we cut our warp paper so that the completed weavings looked all wavy and such. After the weaving were complete we learned how to make optical illusion circles, or as my students called them disco balls. The finished products came out super swell. Plus this project was great in that it was able to incorporate a lot of math in a tricky way that students didn't even realize was that boring old math stuff,  all that compass drawing and ruler measuring!