Thursday, May 19, 2011

Spray Bottle Paintings

Dontcha just love it when you plan a project thinking "Yeah, they'll probably like this. I think." and they love it. Not just love it, but create many, many copies of the project? I especially love it when that happens with my adapted art classes. So many of my objectives with those classes are to help the children grow in areas they are just fine at not growing in, thank you very much. Stretching themselves is especially hard for these kids, so many of my lessons are greeted with resistance. Today, however all but one kid created multiples of the project! Even my most severe young student picked up a spray bottle and started her own second project! She usually waits for her classmates to be done with their project so she can go back to class. It was so rewarding to watch these kids flourish today. Seriously, I'm kinda on a little high from it. All we did was use spray bottles of red, yellow, and blue liquid watercolors to spray large pieces of paper. I had three stations set up that I thought would be easy to clean up (ha!). One on my white board (easy-ish, once I remembered to move the markers!), one in my trusty kiddie pool (super easy!) and one on a wall that I taped large paper over (not easy at all! Make sure the paper goes all the way to the floor! I'm gonna have to bleach my wall. Oops.) We taped paper to the station, handed the child a bottle of each color and let them go to town. I'll post the results later, as they aren't dry yet. Beautiful, vibrant colors.