Ms. Edwards' Art Room

This is a new 5th grade papermache lesson. The fifth graders learned about the history and craftsmanship involved in carving wooden Oaxacans. Oaxacans are carved animals painted bright colors and decorated with many designs. Oaxacans are made in Mexico. The first step in this project was sketching out the animal they were going to build from recycled material and papermache. Because some Oaxacans are imaginary animals, students could draw a real or imaginary animal. After going over some basic building techniques, the students built their animal form. We added 2 layers of papermache and then painted them. The last step was decorating our animals with designs and patterns. The results were quite amazing.

This is a brand new 3-d lesson combining information from the 4th grade Wellness curriculum and papermache sculpture building techniques. The lesson started out with a brainstorm of all the different shapes that germs, viruses and bacteria can be. We also looked at photos of magnified germs and bacteria. Using tissue boxes decorated with germ creatures as inspiration, we drew our own germ monsters. Starting with a basic shape we added multiple eyes, eye stalks, horns, spines, tails and hair. We started building with recycled materials and added 2 layers of papermache to make it smooth. Then we painted and decorated them. The students had great fun going through the bins and bags of random materials collected throughout the year. They came up with some fabulous creations!!