Paper Mâché Cactus

I made these little potted cactus with over 20 4-6 yr. old children during our afternoon summer camp program.  I won't lie, the paper mâché part was mostly one on one.  Sometimes, I could do two kids at once.  But it really helped if you could hold the ballon while they apply the goopy newspaper. This made it time consuming.  

But worth it!  

I mean look how cute they are!!!

I use liquid starch for my adhesive.  I find it easiest and it dries hard.  

Water balloons are the perfect size for these.

After covering the balloon with newspaper, we covered it in green tissue paper.  Dark green covered the best, while the light green needed a lot more layers.

It also help if you could hold the balloon while the kids applied the tissue.  You didn't need to soak the tissue in starch.  If you just apply it to the balloon it will be fine.  Add starch on top, if needed, to smooth it down.

Let dry overnight, then poke toothpicks though.

We made a small tissue paper flower for the top.  

I also went and added a dab of glue around each toothpick to hold them in place.  They had a tendency to go right through and fall inside.

I took a lot of pictures, because they were just so adorable!

Art Auction 2016

A few pictures from this year's Fun'rasier.

Our Raccoon Class: 

Plate of Hands

It was a miracle this plate came out of the kiln with all of its digits!  We actually did not put this plate in the auction, but decided to give it as an end of year gift to our director.

Collection of Hearts.

We were missing one child's heart, so we left an empty space in the bottom corner, and when it was fired we gave the heart along with some glue to the winning families.

We used leaves and stamps to make the imprints on the hearts and cut them out with different sized cookie cutters. 

We glazed them in several different shades of red.

Hearts of butterflies

The Hiboux Class:

Two framed owls.  One made from a collage of painted paper, one from finger prints. 

A beautiful bird mobile made from the teacher's drawings.

Dot paintings.

Elephant Class

My mosaic hopscotch.

Fairy Garden, which included a rock I painted to look like a pond.

Elephant basket.

Wild Thing Class

The Wild Things also made some beautiful books.  They were printed in sepia and had the children inside a picture frames.

Giraffe Class

Giraffe related basket, that well ...oops, I forgot to get a picture of.  And I thought I was doing so well?!

The Dot book and canvas painting.

Monkey Class

Tiles with sharpie and watercolors.

Cooking basket, with recipe book of all the cooking they have made over the year.

Afternoon Class

Potted garden.

I think the afternoon class also has a basket, that yep, I forgot to photograph. 

In my defense, it was quite a hectic day!

Ben's Bells Kindness Mural

Last week parents and teachers came together to put up a "be kind" mural at the front of our school.  Ben's Bells is an amazing non-profit in Tucson, that promotes the importance of kindness.  

The mission of Ben's Bells is to "inspire, educate, and motivate people  to realize the impact of intentional kindness, and to empower individuals to act according to that awareness, thereby strengthening ourselves, our relationships and our communities."  Learn more about Ben's Bells here:    https://bensbells.org 

Our school, St. Mark's, is what is called a "Kind Campus".  We promote kind actions and words within our school.  At this time there is no real curriculum through Ben's Bells at the preschool level.  So how does our school teach young children at this age kindness?   We believe that it is necessary at this age to give children the vocabulary they need to express themselves.  We also believe in the importance of promoting a child's social-emotion well-being.

Basically, we promote kindness at this young age through literacy, through modeling positive words and actions, and by constantly positively reinforcing kind behavior.  As Jeanette Maré states, kindness is a learned behavior.  It's not taught in one day.  By starting early the power of kindness has the ability to become something wonderful and affect and motivated everyone around us.