Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Glue, Glue, Glue, What To Do?

Alternative titles for this post include "Glue, The PITA For Every Art Teacher" or "Ways To Make Glue More Interesting That Don't Involve Sniffing".  But neither felt very professional (hmmmm, I wonder why?)
Disclaimer: this is not my original idea.  I saw it somewhere, on some blog and I can't find the original poster to adequately credit them (so if it's you, or you know where the original post is, let me know and I will link it to this post).
As I said in my last post, I've been at this gig of elementary art teaching for a while, and glue--uuuuuggghhhhhh.  I've always kept glue bottles separate from table boxes in my room to minimize the mess (they just don't close them!), but lately the build-up of hard dried glue has caused some cuts, and I felt like they really weren't learning how to adequately use/care for glue bottles. (GRAVITY affects glue, children! Just wait, and glue will come out.)
So, in my purge/cleaning fest, I made sure I had one low shelf (low enough for kindergarten to reach easily) empty to carry out this upside down glue idea:




A co-worker had the baking sheets, and I covered them with Contact paper and used Command velcro-like strips to attach them.  The glue bottles have magnets E6000 glued to them.  



I bought two different types of magnets, the craft kind that come 50+ in a package, and some super-strong ones that I found by the Command hooks.  I actually liked the craft kind (that I glued two per glue bottle) more that the bigger ones, which was surprising.


Sorry, my continuing inability to turn photos
means you'll have to turn your head like a
German Shepard trying to figure something out.


Viola! 'This is going to be awesome,' I thought, 'Glue will always be near the tip, ready to come out, the bottles will have to be closed so they won't drip!'  Until I came in the next day and the weight of the glue bottles pulled a corner of the baking sheet down AND whenever you try to put the bottles back up your hand knocks about half of them down.  
Back to the drawing board. 
In that trying-to-go-to-sleep time (when I get most of my ideas, honestly), I thought cupcake pans would work--but the glue bottles are too wide.  My backup idea was bread pans, but I didn't have enough.  So the next day, after a seven hour meeting (great idea the day before school starts), I began hunting for new (so I wouldn't have to clean grease off to get them to stick) cheap ('cause I've got two children of my own to buy school supplies for) bread pans.  At Walmart I found these for 88 cents a piece:



I also bought more of those Command velcro-hook-thingys:




It worked out that three pans hang over each baking sheet, and each bread pan can hold 6-9 glue bottles comfortably.  I've talked to most of my classes about it, and the ones who've seen them are super-duper excited to use upside down glue.



We're going to give it the old college try, this upside down glue idea.  I'll update later in the year.  

Happy first days/weeks everyone! The whirlwind has begun!

1 comment:

  1. Well, 4 years later….did it work out, or total disaster bc the kids STILL don’t close the bottles?

    ReplyDelete

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