Happy Chinese New Year

I've been enjoying my summer holidays for the past few weeks but I realised today is Chinese New Year so I thought I'd post some dragons for Year of the Dragon. These clay sculptures were made by some of my grade 4 students last year as part of a fantasy theme. I plan to do some more dragons once I get back to school - Chinese style dragons this time.

Cardboard Castles

These castles were made by one of my grade 3 classes using two pieces of white card. 

This lesson was inspired by this lesson from dickblick. 

One long piece of card was folded into seven equal sections and decorated as a castle with watercolour pencils and textas. Turrets were cut from the top and some students cut out doors and windows, made small flags to glue to their towers etc. Another piece of card, folded in half, forms the ground and background (a lot of the kids had trouble with the idea of where moats and roads should go!) Once completed I glued the castles to their background piece with a glue gun.

Fantasy Castle Sculptures

Here's another project from a few years ago using recycled materials (I'm a big fan of recycled projects as you may have gathered...)

This group of grade 2s and I collected loads of old cardboard boxes, cylinders and newspapers to construct these fantasy castles. We looked at pictures of real castles in the U.K and Europe as well as drawings in fairy tales so they could get ideas about the important features of castles.

Then there was cutting, gluing and taping together of bits and pieces before papier mache with newspaper and a coat of paint. I like that they are imperfect - almost like old castles in ruins.

Castle Paintings

Grade 2 students created a drawing of their own imaginary castle after looking at books about castles and fairy tales featuring castles. They then painted their castles and used wooden skewers to draw textures into the paint whilst still it was wet. Once dry, they outlined their work in a black marker.

Big Bad Wolves

Inspiration: The children used their imagination to draw a Big Bad Wolf from a fairy tale.

After discussing the characteristics of wolves and how to make them look big and bad, I asked these grade 2 students to draw and then colour with oil pastels.

Clay Treasure Chests

I made these clay treasure chests with grade 2, but this would work with older children too.

Boxes were made with slab construction by creating a bottom, two side pieces and two end pieces and joining together with a lot of slip and extra clay! Boxes were decorated with padlocks, handles and rivets and clay tools were used to scratch in a wood grain texture. Later we also created a lid piece and after firing, chests were painted in brown and metallic paints.

They came out a bit rough looking - but I think it makes them look quite rustic and authentic.

For display I filled the chests with sequins to look like shiny treasure!