4th Grade Recycled CD Snowflakes

Another Ohio winter, another way to incorporate more recycling into my curriculum. If you've followed my blog for any amount of time, you'll know I'm pretty opposed to holiday themed projects. Holiday crafts can happen in the regular classroom. We learn about art in my room. This lesson revolves around a big part of winter- snowflakes!

About 5 years ago, a box of old software CDs was dumped in my room. You know, somebody has something that they don't really want to throw away, so they give it to the art teacher. "I had these and I thought of you!" they say. Inwardly, I'm figuring out where I can store these newly found "treasures" or how I can surreptitiously get rid of them. 

Luckily, I was able to figure out something to do with the CDs. Good thing, too. I've got enough to last me into the next decade. I had previously done a paper mosaic snowflake geometry project with my 4th graders. Looking back, it was pretty terrible. I suppose I could have switched a few things around and improved it, but I came up with this instead. 

Students study mosaic artwork as well as the natural geometry of snowflakes. I show them how to fold and cut a six sided snowflake. After that, students simply mount the snowflake on either a gold or silver poster board, trim the board, and add CD shards. The best snowflakes tend to be the ones in which students carefully match the shape of CD pieces to the design of the snowflake. The outcome can be extraordinarily beautiful. 

**Helpful hint- no amount of pounding on a CD with a hammer will break a CD into little pieces. I use my paper cutter to slice the CDs into strips which easily break apart into smaller pieces for students to use. 

Click here to download my full lesson plan!

Hundertwasser Inspired Abstract Tree Sculptures by 2nd Grade

I like to set goals for myself for each school year. They are usually based around what I'm going to teach in a given year. This year, my goal is to write a sculpture lesson plan for each grade level. I have really nice display shelving that I fear goes unused for much of the year simply because of the fact that I like to save most of my ceramic work for the art show in the spring. 

This lesson is the first part of my goal coming to fruition. The basic idea came from a blogger I found through Pinterest. I adapted the artwork that her students created and re-worked the artist inspiration to match some other ideas that were rumbling around in my head. 

The artist I used to inspire the lesson is the multi-talented Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. If you don't know this guy, look him up. He's a complete trip. I like his paintings, but his architecture is amazing. During class, we talked about his use of organic lines, bright colors, and his passion for environmentalism. We then created tree sculptures made almost entirely from recycled materials. 

Hundertwasser has many paintings featuring trees that look strikingly similar to lollipops  We took the idea of lollipop trees and made trees with lollipop leaves. The trees were made from poster board scraps, newspaper, scrap construction paper, a little Modge Podge, and a bit of glue. We thought it was pretty funny that we were making recycled art trees out of paper that originally came from trees. I think we completed some sort of environmental circle with this lesson. Either way, it was a super successful lesson and a great learning experience for my 2nd graders!

Click here to download my lesson plan!

  

4th Grade CD Snowflake Mosaics

4th grade has again totally rocked out these recycled CD snowflakes. This is one of those "sure thing" projects that 90% of kids totally knock out of the park. It looks spectacular on display and uses up a nice stack of ancient software CDs that I have sitting in my classroom. 

This project has even been featured by another blogger as a "Top Winter Art Project." A commenter said on that blog that she wouldn't ever have 4th graders do this project because it is FAR TOO DANGEROUS. Well, danger is my middle name. In a little place I call reality, this isn't at all a dangerous project. I have over 100 4th graders and not one of them even were cut by the CDs. It is all about teaching students how to respect the materials and use them correctly. It's just plastic after all. 

My students really enjoy this project. If you think yours will, too, feel free to use my lesson plan!

4th Grade Recycled CD Snowflake Mosaics

I've got to say I'm pretty proud of this project. A lot of us bloggers tend to borrow ideas from other teachers (rightfully so), so it is refreshing to write completely original lesson plans from time to time. This lesson came about a couple of years ago after a technology support teacher dropped off a box filled with 90's software CDs that would no longer work with our computer system. I think I had them for at least a year before figuring out what to do with them and writing this lesson. 

The internet is good for a lot of things. Figuring out how to shatter CDs is not one of those things. I tried hammers and other blunt objects to no avail. One site said to freeze the CDs overnight before bludgeoning them into small pieces. Nope. I ended up going back to my trusty paper cutter. It works like a charm. I just cut the CDs into strips. As it cuts them, it creates cracks throughout the strip. They are then easy for kids to snap apart into smaller pieces. 

Check out my full lesson plan here!

3rd Grade Recycled Magazine Bowls

It feels like it's been quite a while since I last posted! Between spring break and being in the middle of some long projects, I haven't had a lot to post about until now. 


I've always been a big proponent of being green in the art room. I try to incorporate recycling into as many projects as I can. I've even wearing a shirt with the recycling symbol (and a narwhal!) right at this very moment! I think any time you can help students understand the reasons behind why being green is important, it is a high quality addition to a lesson. 


Over the last couple of years I have played with the thickness of the magazines for this project. I've figured that 3/4" is just about perfect for my 3rd graders. I cut strips of chip board for my students to wrap their magazine pages around. They all end up doing around 50 pages before attaching them all together and rolling them into a disk. This project is pretty consistently successful and I recommend it if you're looking for something fun, green, and inexpensive!


Check out the lesson here!

Recycled CD Snowflake Mosaics by 4th Grade

Recycling is really important to me. Honestly, I think it would be difficult to find an art teacher who wouldn't feel the same way. I try to incorporate recycling into many of my projects and I'm particularly proud of this one. 


A couple of years ago, I had two big boxes of old computer software CDs. They had been donated over the course of a couple of years and I had no idea what to do with them. Every once in a while I would look for ideas online, but I would usually come away empty handed. In the meantime, I had been doing a project with 4th grade that used paper mosaic pieces to create snowflakes. Last year the light bulb (CFL of course) finally popped on. I would break the CDs and use them to create the mosaics. 


The first problem was how to break them. I tried just about everything including smashing them with a hammer and even freezing them to make them more brittle. Nothing worked the way I wanted it to and I finally went to the old standby- the paper cutter. My paper cutter is probably older than me and that means it's awesome. The new paper cutters always disappoint me. They're just not as heavy or sturdy. I simply slice up the CDs on the paper cutter. From there, the kids can either snap them apart into smaller pieces or cut them with scissors. These pieces are glued onto a snowflake that has been cut out and glued onto a piece of silver chip board. They turn out great and end up making a nice piece to take home before winter break. 

Find my lesson plan here!

Newest Bottle Cap Art Installed!

When we do bottle cap art at Thomas, we go big. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may recall that my 4th Grade students created a new bottle cap mural last year specifically for the library. Here is a link to the original post. The mural was installed over the summer and it looks great! I thought I would post a few pictures of the finished piece.

4th Grade Bottle Cap Mural

This project seems to be a favorite among students, parents, and blog readers.  This is the third year in a row the 4th grade has created a bottle cap mural for permanent display in the school.  The previous two have gone in separate stairwells, but this mural will be placed in four side-by-side windows in the library.  This year, students decided to make Dr. Seuss characters and spell out the word 'READ' on the mural.

In the past, I've gotten a many questions about how this process is done, so I'll describe it in more detail this year.  Of course, if anyone has questions, please feel free to post a question in the comments area or email me directly.  The work is all inspired by Michelle Stitzlein, a local artist who works with school groups and has quite an impressive collection of her own fine art work.  She focuses on the use of recycled materials in her art.

First, the boards are primed with a latex primer.  The design is then drawn out with sharpie and the whole mural is painted with either latex or acrylic paints.  This gives the mural a base color and allows for some spaces to stand alone without caps if need be.  Sharpie is again used to clean up edges and define colors.  The next part can be done a couple of different ways.  I know some people like to do all the caps at one time and bring in parent volunteers with cordless drills to help out.  I like working on it gradually.  I just have the kids carefully hot glue the caps on the boards then I put screws into the caps later on.  I use these screws.  To give an idea of how many to buy, I used right around 2000 screws for the mural this year.