Still Lifes on Plastic

     In fifth grade, I often do a still life unit and have found that students can find the style a bit dry.  So when we learn about still lifes, I try to use unexpected media that the kids find more exciting.  To start, we practiced by painting plants on small papers without using pencils first.  I told them to paint the shape that was closest to them first, and to then try to fill in all the other shapes they see around it.

     For the bigger project, we painted  fruit baskets onto lamenation scraps that the office saves for me.  I added a bit of hand soap to the black tempera paint to help it adhere, and it worked really well.  We used only black paint because we stapled them to wallpaper and I didn't want the images to get lost.  We stapled them with the fragile painted side in, so they would not get scratched while hanging in the hallway or scratched on the way home.

     The kids then used oil pastels and metallic liquid watercolors to paint construction paper that would become frames for their artworks.  They used patterns to design these and absolutely loved painting with the metallic paint.  The kids liked this project and the end result was so easy to hang in the hallway because they didn't need mounted onto any other paper.  I just stapled on nametags and they were ready!