The Creative Housewife Chronicles : Summer Project: Art Class #1

My latest little creative undertaking is hosting "art classes" from my home during the summer. My first program I've dubbed "Exploring Different Textiles," and it consists of five classes. I host each class one per week (but three times a week so more kids can come). These are the classes I'm planning on doing:

Art in Tissue Paper
Going Green with Art (Art from recyclable goods)
Going Green with Art pt.2
Art of Food: Lentils
Art in Melted Wax

I'll try to keep posting updates about our activities.

For this first class, the kids came in and sat down at a place on the table that already had supplies laid out.
I talked to them briefly--sort of an intro--about different kinds of art: how art is really virtually limitless. The kids had fun coming up with examples of different kinds of art--one of them brought up a hotel made of ice (which I said that yes, architecture can be considered a form of art), another child said that art can be made out of metal. We also talked about pottery, glass work, sidewalk art, and so on.

After this, we began the activity. I generally don't like crafts that are too authoritative in telling you exactly how to do something; I think it defeats the purpose of doing an art project. If I'm telling you exactly how to do something, how is it really your creation? However, the kids I'm working with are ages 6-9 and need some structure, so I couldn't leave it entirely free form. I did try to stress that the project example I made was just that--an example, and that they should decorate the fish in whatever ways they thought best, because it's their project.

My sample fish

Our first class was art with tissue paper. I ended up settling on fish for this project, because I really liked the idea of the tissue paper scales. I went online and found a fish story to go with the craft, and I told them the story while they worked.
(The story is called "The Fisherman's Wife," and the moral of the story is that you should be grateful for what you have, and--as one child put it when we were discussing it afterwards--not be too greedy. Our fish represented the enchanted prince fish from the story.)

Telling the story, I found, was a great way to make the fish project more relevant. It also entertained the children, and gave us something to talk about. After the story, the kids asked questions such as

Was it a true story?
Was the fish really a prince, or just an enchanted fish who said that so he could escape?
Was the wife happy or sad when she lost all the things she'd wished for and went back to living in the little hut?

These were all fantastic questions that gave me an opportunity to ask them what they thought. For example, one boy of a pair of brothers thought the wife was sad, and the other happy. I liked how they had a creative outlet in which to think, as well as to do something creative with their hands.

We taped a piece of yarn to the back of the fish,
so that it was like the fish the fisherman caught. Also,
now the kids can hang it up at home if they want.

For the project, I drew a fish outline based off of pictures of beta (because they're beautiful and seemed fun to decorate). I cut it out and made a "stencil" from it, and used that to cut duplicates when I was sure the project would work with the one I'd made. I cut the fish out of cardboard I had from a leftover lamp box.

I cut scales out of four colors of tissue paper (my work was made faster by layer multiple pieces of tissue paper, so I got more scales for each cut).