Students sewed felt bears and stuffed them. Then they designed clothes, named their bears and created a companion book about their bear’s adventures. It was a long project, 5-6 weeks and they struggled with threading the needles and stitching up the bears, but I think they really enjoyed the challenge and I know they felt proud of their end products!

Students designed teacup cards for Mother’s Day. We used tissue paper with mod podge as a background and then they added design elements in colored and foil paper, buttons and gemstones. They wrote personal messages inside and we enclosed a bag of tea so all of the mom’s out there can have a cup of tea and relax

I cut out the shape of the fish onto a white poster board and then pasted colored tissue paper onto fish shapes in different colors with Mod Podge. Mod Podge is a water based sealer or glue, I selected the Gloss-Lustre because of the shine. I did this first step to save time. It takes a day to dry.

The students then got an assortment of tissue papers and a little bit of Reynolds wrap for detail and they cut and arranged patterns and shapes onto fish, when they were ready to glue they used the Mod Podge with a paint brush to anchor the image and some of them added a tail.

I had the students sketch out three ideas for images of foreign or imaginary countries. Some images were abstract and some were more illustrative. Students learned six techniques: wet on wet, gradated washes, solid washes, salt, rubbing alcohol drops with a q-tip, and saran wrap. I put no restrictions on their use of color or what techniques they used.