Communal Spring Eggs

To help us celebrate the Easter weekend in a non-demoninational way, I chose to have the students create communal spring eggs. The idea here was that we would work together in creating some communal art, before we worked individually to create our own unique egg.


Materials 
Tempura Paint
paint brushes
watercolour paints
crayons
11x17" white paper
Fingerpainting paper
plastic tub
Marbles
newspaper

Directions:

Have the students sit down at their tables with an 11x17" piece of paper each, with access to crayons.
As a group, discuss the shapes and lines that they can make (circles, triangles, squares, flowers, as well as straight lines, dashed lines, zig-zags, squiggly etc).
Demonstrate with them making a simple patter across the top, and discuss careful colouring, filling in all of the shapes etc.  Talk to the students about the way the crayon resist works, and why we want to fill in our shapes and patterns.
Once the students had filled in an adequate amount of space using thier patterns, we used to watercolours to colour-block the page - some students used only 2 colours, some used 17 - give them that freedom.

While the students were working on their crayon resist patterns, I was pulling students one or two at a time to come create a marble painting. Using a platic tub/bin, I placed fingerpainting paper into the bottom and directed the students to splatter some paint blobs onto the paper by flicking a paintbrush with their wrist. They loved this part!! The students then dropped in 4-7 marbles and worked together to roll them around the paper by tilting the tub. The results were really beautiful and unique - and a great way to reinforce to students that art doesn't always stay in the lines.

During the Lunch break, I cut their art work into a variety of pieces - thick rectangles, thin zigzag lines, etc. I used lots of my crazy scissors, which I always enjoy.

When the students came back from lunch, they arrived to bunches of strips of paper, which they then glued down to a standard piece of 8.5x11" paper. Once they had arranged their papers so that they was no more white, they cut out the shape of an egg, which was outlined on the other side of their papers.

The result was fabulous!!