When students come back to school, they are overflowing with summer stories. Enrichment teachers can put that information to use by making students do some fluent thinking to create some back to school art. This is a fun, three hour activity that incorporates reflection, measurement,design, and creative writing.
Using Fluent Thinking to Start a Lesson
Students should make a fluent list of everything that happened over the summer. Limit the time to 3-5 minutes, depending on student age. (The younger they are, the slower they write, so the longer they need.)
Students should then categorize their lists into four groups. Examples could include “Family”, “Friends”, and “Adventure”.
Students should then sketch out some small, simplistic drawings that they can reproduces multiple times for each category. Students will then have four drawings.
Instructions to Draw a Kaleidoscope
Students should use 5x5 papers (or any proportionally adjusted square size) to create the kaleidoscopic mirror art.
(These instructions are adapted, with permission, from a Kaleidoscopic Octagon activity by Alicia Steer, a gifted education teacher in Norman, Oklahoma.)
- Fold the square in half, horizontally. Unfold it.
- Fold the square in half vertically. Unfold it.
- Fold the square in half diagonal. Unfold it.
- Fold the square in half for the other diagonal. Unfold it.
- Use a straight edge or ruler to draw straight lines across all of the fold lines
- With a ruler, measure 2.5 inches from the center of each line. Mark 2.5 with a dot. For six of the lines, this will be close to the edge.
- Copy the four category drawings in each of the sections of the top of the octagon. Students may want to add additional designs. The top four sections are 1, 2, 3, 4 (from left to right). The bottom four sections are -4, -3, -2, -1 (from left to right).
- In the bottom four sections, mirror the designs. For example, a flag facing to the left on box one of the top will face to the right on box one of the bottom. One strategy is to turn over the paper that the original sketches are on and draw from that mirror image, although reversing the vertical and horizontal image is not necessary.
Some students may need more than one hour to create this kaleidoscopic mirror drawing. It is much easier to do all the folding and kaleidoscope set up as a class, and then draw independently.
After the student has drawn images on the octagon, it is time to cut it out along the outer lines and turn it in.
Day Three (Hour 3)
The teacher needs to mix up kaleidoscopes so that students will not get their own, and it is best if the kaleidoscopes come from another class so that students do not know the stories behind the art. This blissful ignorance is helpful because students are going to write stories based on the kaleidoscope.
Setting Up a Simple Story Structure
It is vital that students remember to make their creative writing stories happy and appropriate. They are going to look at the kaleidoscope and write a creative “Adventures of (Insert Name)” story based on the picture. Some details will be wildly off-base. For example, the author might think that a picture of a lake is actually a picture of a peanut.
A good story structure is...Once upon a time there was a person, and every day she would (picture one). Then one day, she (picture two). Suddenly, she had a problem, so she (picture three). To solve the problem, she (picture four).Of course, students have to insert details to make the story more than a simple paragraph.
The next day, students get to have their kaleidoscope mirror drawings returned, along with the creative stories that deciphered them. The drawings make nice student-art decorations for parents to enjoy at Open House and Back to School Night.
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