Beautiful Flowers



Show and Share Found Materials

As our show and share activity for the month of January each student was asked to bring in a bag with found materials from around the house that the class could reuse. We would give a brown paper lunch bag with a note attached that described what types of materials we were looking for and what we were going to do as a class with the found materials to whoever was the "special person" the next school day. During show and share time the special person would choose a few items and describe what it was and where they found it. Some bags had a lot of items so the special person would usually only show a few things. We let the class know that when we sorted all the bags at the end of the month it would be a surprise to see what was left in the bags!

 

Sorting the Found Materials

At the end of the month when each student had brought in their "beautiful stuff" we separated the class into 2 groups to sort everything. The ECE in the classroom had one group and I had the other. Ahead of time we had collected clear plastic containers (vegetable/fruit containers) to sort the found materials. Let me tell you it definitely took a lot longer than expected to sort as the children were so intrigued by the various items! It was really fascinating to listen to their conversations with one another about the items and the many questions they had. A lot of children were asking what some of the items were and what they were used for. Others were pretending they were something completely different than what it was (a hair clip became a dinosaur for one little boy). Some children became attached to items and didn't want to put them in the bin (especially the beautiful broken jewelry pieces). When we were done sorting, we labelled each container and they were organized on the shelves at the art centre for the students to explore on their own and to make pieces of art from.

Making a collage with the sorted items.

Creating beautiful flower art pieces from found materials

After the found materials were on the art shelf for the students to freely explore for about a week we decided to do a class art project with each child. Right now we are doing a growing plants investigation and we had just planted some spring flowers in a tray and added it to our indoor garden centre. To tie in with our investigation we decided to create some beautiful flowers from our found materials.

Exploring and choosing items to create our flower pictures



Completed art piece

 While the students were creating their pictures I would take photographs of the process and document their thinking.

 

Class finished art project "Beautiful Flowers" on display.