smART Recycle

Yesterday, my 5th grade students were fully engaged in a fabulous art project - which was all about using recycled materials.  While I typically teach art once a week to them, we were lucky to have a parent volunteer come in and do a project with Kindergarten through 8th grade.  For the past couple of weeks, the school has been collecting recyclable materials to be used for this project which will be featured in our end of the year Art Expo.

Each class is pretending they have discovered a new species of tropical birds. From there they use the materials provided to create their bird.  Some classes used water bottles, others paper plates, etc. My class used a box as the body and went from there.  Before the boxes were first handed out, they were first spray painted in bright colors.  After that, students used toilet paper rolls cut in quarters for eyes and Q-tips for feet along with a bunch of other scrap and recycled material.  They used sticky tabs and tape to put their bird together and when finished, we reinforced it all with a hot glue gun.

Now, comes the next fun part! Creating a story about their bird - the students will create stories about how they found their bird, create a description and even name their bird.  They are still working on the actual design part, so we haven't moved on to the creative writing just yet.  However, I wanted to share their fabulous designs!

Have you ever used recyclable materials for an art project? What did you do??