Lesson 8: Gallery Walk!

For the last day of class I started out by having my students finish painting their paper mache houses with acrylic paint. If some of them finished early they were allowed to work on any of their previous projects that they wanted to or free draw. I had some students work on their button mosaics and putting more buttons on their paintings and I had some students continue to water color their surreal animal paintings. Once the paint dried on their paper mache houses we still had a little extra time of class so students were able to decorate their houses with buttons, fabric, sequins and more! Afterwards we cleaned up the room a little bit just in time for the parents to start arriving to see their kids work. I had previously pinned up every student's work to the walls in an organized manner and the parents were very interested to see all of the work their kids have done. My students were also very excited to show off their work to their parents, which I thought was great! All in all I think the last class went very smoothly and I could not have been more proud of all of my students and the work they've accomplished!

Lesson 7: Catch-Up Class

For my second to last class I had students catch up on work that they haven’t gotten to finish yet. For the first half of the class most students still had to finish paper-machèing their houses so I had them continue working on that. It went pretty smooth except for several kids who kept insisting they needed my help when I think really they just got tired of applying the paper-mache. There was one student who really did need my help however because they kept putting tons of the paper-mache paste onto their house causing it to collapse every time and I continued to work with them showing them the correct way to slide the paper strips through your fingers to get the paste off. However whenever I walked away to help another student I would come back to their house and it would be covered in paste again and collapsing. I’m still not sure if it was the student’s lack of motivation to slide the paste off the paper, or if they were physically struggling with this task and became frustrated causing them to try less. In the end though we were able to get their house paper-mache’d correctly. After the students had finished with their paper mache houses I had them finish watercolor painting their animals and then after that there was still a little left over time to work on their mosaics. In the end off this lesson my class got a lot of projects accomplished in terms of catching up to things and for the next class they are all excited to show their work to their parents so that should be exciting!