3rd Grade: Recycled Daisies & Dragonflies

For this project, we talked about being resourceful artists by using things that would normally be thrown out or recycled to make art.  I have boxes of painted paper (from past projects and the entire year's placemats we use) and stacks of magazines from my school's library.  We began by tracing the shapes for either a daisy or dragonfly.  I tell them that about half of their shapes should be painted paper, and the other half magazine paper.  Then students glue these shapes onto a bright springy colored construction paper and cut them out, leaving  a border.  Finally, they glue those shapes onto large black construction paper (18x24") and cut around the whole object.  There is something really interesting about the mix of the magazine graphics and the random painted paper.  These are very large pieces and look really cool scattered around our school walls.