First Grade Gaudi Towers

This one came from the May 2011 issue of Arts and Activities.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to try it out.  When I became the art teacher at my school, I inherited TONS of large cardboard spools. They were perfect for this project!

We started out by looking at a variety of images of Antoni Gaudi's sculptures. The students loved them! They were unlike any other scultpure they had seen previously.

Then I gave each student a spool and a black marker. I had them draw lines onto the spool with the marker. They chose what kind of lines they wanted- we had lots of straight and zig zag.

Here is were I adapted the project from the original. In the original, it has the entire spool covered in air dry clay. With over 100 students working on this project, that was not a cost-effective way to do this. So what we did, was I had they students cover only their lines with air dry clay.

 They would add glue to a small section of their line and then roll out a piece of air dry clay to about the size of their pinkie finger. They glued this onto the spool. Then they took old broken crayons that I had been collecting and broke them into small pieces and glued those on top of the clay.

They had to cover all of the lines that they had drawn with the black marker, using clay and crayons.

Once this was finished, we got out the cheese graters.

We had a lesson on how to use the graters safely, so that no fingers got injured and they used them to grate crayons to create "sprinkles".

They spread glue onto the areas of the spool that did not have clay and then sprinkles the grated crayons on.

The last step was to create a 3 dimensional form for the top of their tower.

We brainstormed a list of 3D forms: cube, sphere, cone, cylinder (I tried to stick with forms that they were currently using in math).

I gave them clay and they made their form and glued it onto the top of their tower. Then they were allowed to decorate them with crayons and sprinkles.

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