Two, Two, Two Projects At Once

There are times where the universe sets up multi-tasking for teachers.  Take today, for example: it's Friday the 13th, we're about to get hammered by a "significant" ice storm, AND it's a full moon.  These are the days that some teachers wonder 'would life in an office be so bad? How would I decorate a cubicle?' But here we are.
In art teacher land, sometimes I have student multi task by working on two projects at once.  Pretty seamlessly, really.  It goes back to the early finishers: rather than let them "free draw" or "make something out of the scrap box" (which I do do many times), sometimes it works out to have two things going.  
Right now, second graders are working on their Today I Feel Silly portraits that you can read all about here.  We'd drawn them and traced them with black glue (I've switched to buying the premixed black glue from Nasco, as I had problems with the glue + ink or paint really drying out in the bottles) and today we were painting them with tempera cakes, which really doesn't take 40 minutes:

As students finished painting, they put their papers on the back table and got 9 x 12 papers to draw buildings that we will later use for a warm/cool cityscape painting.  The directions were to draw any kind of building you'd see in a city and then trace your pencil with dark colored crayon.

The multi-tasking-ness of it worked really well with my second graders, everyone had a job to do and the ability to do it.
Now if only we could get some zen calmness around this school, it sounds like a bit like a wild rave from my college days around here today!