Adaptive Art Welcomes Spring

All you smart art teachers probably already know this, but this was real news to me: did you know that a soda bottle will print flowers?  Amazing!

Totally a staged photo, I didn't take any photos while students were working.

My adaptive classes are in the middle of a HUGE project right now involving clay castles, papier mache hills, tissue paper flowers and Cloud Clay dragons (look for an upcoming post on that one) and the kiln hadn't been fired yet, so I needed a two day filler lesson.  Last weekend when I was at my state conference, an amazing middle school art teacher (she's retiring--students are really going to miss out on her expertise! But she totally deserves an awesome retirement.) shared this idea (I think she got it off of Pinterest).

We started out with light green paper, a small piece of cardboard and green paint.  Students printed grass while I got five colors of paint on five separate lids (one for each student/one bottle for each color).  Students then printed flowers:

Some added more than others, and we were one Coke/Pepsi bottle short so I substituted an off-brand water bottle that didn't work as well:

The yellow ones on this one are from the store brand water bottle.

We then used the other end of the bottle (with the lid) to make the centers, and one student wanted his cardboard back to add stems:

Again, totally staged photo.

We accomplished all of this the first day. With time left over, I gave each student (there's only five in this adaptive group) a photocopy of four butterflies.  [Let me pause and say that I got this drawing of butterflies many many years ago somewhere--my old district or a conference or something, and I really wish I knew who created it, because it's saved my booty several times over the years.]  Each student colored their butterflies with markers.  The next day they came in and the directions were to cut out ONE butterfly and color the back (this proved to be a difficult direction as they wanted to cut them all out and I was worried about them getting mixed up, but with five students and four paras and two teachers, no butterfly was lost).

After they colored the back of the butterfly's wings, we glued just the body part, keeping the wings up:

After all butterflies were cut and glued, some students had time to add stems and leaves to their flowers (and some didn't):

These spring pictures will really brighten the walls, and the students did a fabulous job!