“Totally Twisted Trees”
Grades 2-3
Joanna Davis-Lanum, NBCT
Garden Elementary School
Venice, Florida (Sarasota County)
Ever wonder what to do with all those brown paper towels we go through? I have students put aside clean paper towels and allow them to dry for this project. Even the smallest of scraps comes in handy for these cool recycled “trees”.
Purpose:
To expose students to different ways of creating artwork, in essence “Going Green”
Materials:
Dried, used (clean) brown paper towels
Scrap tissue paper
Procedure:
We talk about how important it is to be a resourceful artist, how to use the things around us and how often artists (especially folk artists) do the same thing. I demo how to twist different lengths of paper towels into branches, twigs, sticks and trunks of trees. We twist away and glue the pieces together to make a bare tree. Then, using all the hundreds of pieces of leftover scrap tissue paper I have, the students ball up the tissue paper and glue on the “leaves”. The result is an amazing fall tree in relief, and all students create the most wonderful work!