Georgia O'Keeffe Suncatchers

This project was thanks to a post I found on Mrs. Taylor's Artopolis. It was one of the most complimented projects that we did this year and also one of the easiest!

Thanks to the generous nature of my faculty, I have a large supply of overhead transparencies. With the advent of smart boards, classroom teachers are not using them anymore, so lucky me.... I get all of the leftovers (and save a bundle in my budget in the process!).

I gave each of my PreK students a transparency and a black Sharpie. They wrote their name on the transparency and then returned them to me. I gave each of them a bottle of glue (another supply that I have in large amounts, thanks to my faculty) and showed them how to squirt a large blog of glue onto the transparency (making sure not to go over the edge).

Then the PreK assistant and myself walked around with squirt bottles of food coloring (red, yellow and blue) and squirted 2 drops of each color onto the glue.

I showed the students how to use the handle of a paintbrush to swirl the colors around in the glue. This confused some of them, since we had just learned how to use the paintbrush the right way. The next time I do this with my students, I believe that I will try giving them toothpicks or popsicle sticks to avoid this confusion. Another ah-ha moment, which I will fix next time, is that  when I squirted the 3 primary colors onto their glue, they had a very difficult time knowing when to STOP swirling, so many of them got muddy. Those that had the control to stop, turned out beautiful. Next time- either warm or cool colors.

I placed these onto the drying rack to dry (they actually took 2 days to dry all the way through).

For the next class, the students took a black Sharpie and traced around the outside of their glue, giving them a guide to follow for cutting. They cut along their line and then the adults helped them use a hole punch to create a hole. They were given ribbon to tie through the hole. These were then hung up in the window right outside of the art room, where they caught the morning sun everyday.

After a few days, the transparency began peeling off of the glue. I'm wondering if it might work better if we went ahead and peeled it off completely before adding the ribbon.

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