Kids Art: watercolor and woven picture frame

 Finished up my week of teaching elementary school kids with this grand finale! They drew and painted the birds from my 'collection' from Michaels craft store. Then, since we'd been given a whole bunch of those cheap, colorful, useless brushes, AND, we'd been to Quilt Visions the day before and learned about weaving, they used the collage paper they'd made earlier in the week, and I showed them how to weave the brushes and paper into a frame with fabulous results! You can see the other kids work here.

Kids Art: sea scene

Here's one of the kid's underwater scene paintings. I created this lesson plan, and frankly, I think it's a winner! Here's how we did it in our 2 hour class.
1) Using bubble wrap, painted with white gesso, stamp randomly over the white watercolor paper and let dry.
2) Create  prints using Gyotaku (rubber) fish on white tissue, let dry. (We used BioColor- it works on paper and cloth)
3) Draw an underwater scene with pencil (I demo-ed drawing painting red coral, green kelp). Go over pencil lines with permanent marker, erase pencil. Wet background and drop in blues and purples to create water. Let dry.
4) Carefully cut out fish prints. Mix white glue with a little water, and pour some on the paper, smear it around with your hands. Carefully place cut out fish print on top of glue, and with more glue on your fingers, carefully smooth fish out so it's completely flat and adhered. Let dry. The tissue will dry transparent.
You can see some other examples of the kids art here.