Monsters

In this lesson, we learned about the color wheel, and how you can mix different primary colors (blue, red, yellow) together to get secondary colors (purple, green, orange). The teachers showed examples of this with food coloring in water. We then got to mix shaving cream and two different colors of paint (two primaries to make a secondary) in a cookie tray, making a swirly marbling design. We laid out a big piece of paper into the colorful design, making sure the entire paper was firmly planted in the shaving cream mixture. Afterwards, we laid the paper flat on the table and scraped off the excess shaving cream/paint with a ruler, making it easier for our paper to dry. We could cut out a "monster" in whatever shape we wanted, then decorate it however we wanted. I decided to make an octopus-looking monster. We gave our monster a name and had to pick three adjectives to describe it.

A good extension activity for this project would be to have students create some sort of ocean animal out of their paper, instead of just a monster. The teacher could distribute the paint in the shaving cream in dots rather than lines; perhaps the marbling effect would look more similar to fish scales that way. The students could then write a short story about an adventure their ocean animal goes on, giving them a chance to show what they know about a marine animal or learn something knew about the animal they choose to create. This could be accompanied by reading the book "The Rainbow Fish".

Mandalas

In class we looked at a brief history of mandalas, as well as a video of how they are made and how they relate to Buddhist traditions. The mandala symbolizes the impermanence of life; nothing lasts forever. This is why the monks who create mandalas out of sand destroy their art afterwords, depositing the sand into a river as a blessing to the earth.
We talked about line, shape, and radial symmetry with this lesson. We did a few practice drawings, then began making our own mandala. We had to have at least three different forms of symbolism in our mandala. We folded a separate sheet of circle paper into four quarters, then drew solely on one quarter. We then drew over our pencil lines with sharpie. We took another sheet of circle paper and laid it over our first paper, allowing us to trace the corner of the mandala, which we turned four times to make our completed design. We ended the lesson with the freedom to color, followed by mounting our mandala on a piece of construction paper with a note stating our three forms of symbolism.

I think an alternative extension activity to go along with this project would be to have students assemble a bulletin board with their final mandalas, with construction paper cutouts of stems, leaves, and grasses to make the mandalas look like intricate flowers. Once this was fully assembled, each student could talk about their mandala to the rest of the class. This would give students the chance to work as a group, as well as give them a chance to practice speaking in front of others and expressing their ideas.