Spring art project

I found the idea for this extraordinary art project at De tout et de rien (talk about seriously amazing ideas for children!) Occasionally I come across a project that I want to do as much as my students do. They love it when I join in.

We started this particular piece of art by making rainbows on 12″x12″ sheets of cardstock with oil pastels.  Now I know that I’ve used oil pastels with my class before, but for some reason they were absolutely amazed with them this time around. This could be because I was smudging them into my paper too.

Their rainbows were works of art, seriously, they looked so great!

We started our rainbows late in the afternoon, so I saved the second part of the project for the next morning.  The idea here is that you want to create raindrops that will be raised on the page.  In order to make them three dimensional use a mixture of white glue and water, and then color this with blue food coloring.

We used eye droppers to drip the “rain” mixture onto the rainbow pictures, and then we held our papers up vertically, so that the raindrops would drip down the page.  They slid over the top of the oil pastel.  Honestly, these are so cool!

Here are my kiddos pictures:

And here’s my masterpiece: