Recycled Paper Weaving

 Wow, did I ever love this lesson! These weavings were so fun. They are bright and colorful and with very few exceptions, the results are all great!

The original lesson is from Art Lessons for Kids. I usually do a fabric weaving with my Kindergarten, but it requires a lot of prep for me. I cut the fabric in strips make the looms and wrap the warp, then the students weave. I have plenty of scrap paper, and I only had to cut my donated mat board down to the same size.

The main thing to remember for this lesson is to break it all into small steps. I use centers in my pre-K and Kindergarten classes, so each step was about 15 minutes. One lesson was creating the warp, day 2 was painting the background and warp. Day 3 was weaving (I would NOT do this with a large group of kids at once.) Day 4 was the last day of painting.

I will definitely be doing this project again!

PS. When we were setting up for our district art show last week, I saw another teacher with these same weavings. Hers looked great, too. I told her we must be visiting the same places online.

Outside Weaving

The weather has been too nice to pass up the opportunity for having class outside.

Simple Paper Weaving

I've taught variations of paper weaving in the past, but hadn't seen any like this until this year  from other district art teachers. By simply adding thin strips on top of the thicker ones, they look deceptively complicated. Some of my kids really took off with the idea. Originally, I had planned to have them add smaller shapes to make these more interesting, but the end of the year seemed to come too quickly. These  are first graders.