Day 10: Final Class & Show

I didn’t plan a lesson for our last day. We only had a full hour and a half of class time before we would need to prepare for the final show, so I designated the time as catch up and wrap up time.

First I had students break out their resin bugs and remove the clay from their plaster casts. It was so gratifying to see everyone so excited about their plaster imprints!

I had planned to do a short (faux) batik activity the day before but had run out of time. I figured that even if we couldn’t get to the painting, we could at least start the activity that morning.

So students were given a piece of white cotton fabric and they made glue lines on their fabric to create a design. I had them write the next steps for the project in their sketchbook so they would be able to do it at home. The next steps involved painting the fabric with acrylic or fabric paint and then washing and drying the fabric until the glue dissolves leaving behind white resist lines everywhere.

We set aside our batiked fabric to dry and went outside to spray paint our dinosaur busts from lesson three. One student hadn’t made a bust at all (he instead had completed more of other projects that day) so I directed that student to make more cyanotypes. Other students had had time to cut out acetate stencils after batiking so we also had students spray painting stencils onto paper during this time.

Wrapping up the spray painting we brought all our materials back inside and got ready to head back outside again to erupt our volcano from lesson seven. This was a great fun!

After the volcano we still had about ten minutes before we needed to begin preparing for our show so I had the students watch the TED talk (longer) version of the “chickenosaurus” video from lesson two.

At this point I had the students gather all their own work and put it in bags and on a trolley for taking over to the show.

The show was great! Everyone got to see what our class had been working on and they got to see what all the other classes had been doing. I got to meet and talk to parents and just enjoy admiring all the accomplishments of all the students. It was a wonderful way to wrap up the class.