poet.me

This was the open house project that I had "hanging" in the hall...in quotes because every morning there were a few more casualties on the floor when I got to school that just couldn't hang on any longer.  I actually first did this project 10 years ago for my field placement which was given to me by one my of college professor as an assignment.  I have done it several times in various placements since and decided to once again use as my open house project.  In the past I have bought those foam stickers for the class to decorate their poems with and had the kids mount it on colored construction paper. This year a thought occurred to have them create a background to mount their poetry on.  I envisioned the students using paint brushes to create a picture, but once one student asked if they could use their hands and I replied "sure why not, it's your art piece" it was a momenti di lesson learned for me.  Not only were the papers full of paint, but also the desks, chairs, hands and arms of my class.  They thoroughly enjoyed it and took ownership of their pieces of art, which was my intent, the mess not so much.  I learned that if you give a 5th grader paint, they're going to want to use their hands :) Next time I will cover the desks with some kind of paper, so that the mess can be contained.  I titled the the project 'poet.me', for a play on word due to it being a biography poem.  I also found a really great graphic organizer from the website 'create teach share' to use this year.  Below are some of the more creative pieces to I wanted to share, although they all came out great.

 The kids were only given the primary colors and white, from there these are some of the art pieces that came out of the limitedness.