Sock Monkey Mania

I can hardly contain how excited I am over this project - SOCK MONKEY MAINA!  My middle school elective class learned how to stitch by making these adorable sock monkeys.  I had students observe the lovable stuffed animal and explore how it is made from one pair of socks.  From there, we discussed how to use a patterns and how most successful sewers start with a pattern to guide them through a project.  

I then passed out a ziplock bag for each student to keep their materials from getting jumbled.  They each got a pair of socks, a pair of scissors, one Sharpie, a sock monkey pattern and a needle.  We walked through the directions for sock number one and discussed how to thread a needle, make a knot, and start a basic stitching pattern.  I found this web site helpful How to Make a Sock Monkey to show the basic steps otherwise it would have been quite laborious to create an example for each stage along the way.

The next few classes involved minor finger bleeds, much laughter and students seeing their own success.  I can't express how happy this class was with their final product and I hope they will cherish these stuffed animals for the years ahead!

Onomatopoeias

A beautiful collaboration was made with my 5th grade students' classroom learning and art experience.  I had an opportunity to collaborate with their homeroom teacher and what an impact it makes on student learning, wow!!!  In ELA class, students were embellishing their writing by adding onomatopoeias to their elephant reports.  I quickly acted on this from a pop art perspective and had students look at art work by Roy Lichtenstein and some animated original Batman clips to see how onomatopoeia is used in art.

We then quickly got to work by selecting an onomatopoeia and turned it into bubble letters.  The students enjoyed writing in bubble letters except that each letter needed to touch each other so when it came time to cutting out their onomatopoeia to add to a background, there wouldn't be gaps to cut through.  Students made their background bubbles using newsprint and then created a design that embellished the word that they chose.  The final stage was to glue the word to the bubble and then the bubble to a background which students got to design on their own with oil pastels, watercolor and glitter.

Adding pixelation and details to the onomatopoeia

A student working on the newsprint collage bubble to go underneath their onomatopoeia

Display of exerts from student elephant research project with onomatopoeias 

Adjacent display of artistic variation of onomatopoeias