Fall 2011 Lumpkin County Middle School After School Program
Project 1 - Paste Paper Journal-making. Each student started off designing and creating backgrounds for his/her journal. This was achieved through painting with tempera paints on white blank paper. Backgrounds varied in color and texture. Tools, such as plastic utensils and textured items, were provided to scrape, push, pull, imprint or wipe paint across the paper to attain variety and visual interest.
The students were encouraged to create four separate backgrounds in order to have more resources to pull from when it came time to collage their journal covers. These were allowed to dry overnight in order to be ready the next workshop day.
From these varied backgrounds, students made decisions about their journal cover designs. They cut, tore, glued, and manipulated their background pieces to further layer in an expressive design.
Project 1 ended on the third day. By now, each student has collaged pieces of his/her background resources to a cardboard journal cover to create an overall design. They were instructed this last day to also fold and cut blank sheets of white paper to create 'signatures' to go inside their journal cover. Signatures are the blank white pages within the journal. After the signatures were prepared, the students bound all the ingredients together with needles and yarn (with adult supervision). The final designs were impressive, colorful, and quite unique, and the students had a great time showing off their hard work to the camera!
Project 2 - Artist Trading Cards. Step one was to again create backgrounds with paint, crayons, or markers.
This project did not seem to require as much time as the paste paper journals. Here, the cards were decorated to represent the artist's interests, heritage, character, and talents. This extra time gave students time to really embellish their cards.
Our third and final day working on the trading cards was a success! By now, all of the students have created at least two cards (one to keep and one to trade). Many of the students made more than the requirement. And again, the students were tickled at displaying their creativity along their arms and hands! Take a closer look at some of these. How fun!
Project 3 - Shadow Puppet Show. The entire group of students was split into five groups. These smaller groups were encouraged to create shadow puppet characters and a skit to be performed on the last day. Well, everyone jumped right in and started sketching. Each group was given paper to sketch out skits, scenes, and designs. Scripts were conjured up at this moment, as well.
After preliminary designs were approved and tweaked, card stock was provided to transfer the final designs to. This thicker paper is more rigid and can stand up with less support than the other paper. Control sticks would be taped to the card stock in order to manipulate the final puppets.
After preliminary designs were approved and tweaked, card stock was provided to transfer the final designs to. This thicker paper is more rigid and can stand up with less support than the other paper. Control sticks would be taped to the card stock in order to manipulate the final puppets.
...and on the final day, all of the children's hard work paid off! The shadow puppet show was a SUCCESS! & full of giggles and silliness.