Coloring and Creative Play

Two weeks ago, we used our artistic talents to create designs on cloth and create tee-pees.  The students decorated their cloths with Native American symbols.  It was challenging to build the wooden structure, but we were lucky enough to have a few extra parent helpers lend a hand.

Today we kept our chapter meeting lower key, and we enjoyed being creative with our coloring! Here are some of the stations that were available for the kids!

Color a Smile: 
There is an organization I recently came across called Color a Smile.   They are a nonprofit that sends coloring pages to people in need of cheer.  From the elderly to the troops, they send out colorful pages collected from people all over the US all the time!

ColAR: 
One of my favorite apps is ColAR.  ColAR is an Augmented Reality app. that allows kids to color special pages and then use the app to bring their colored pictures to life 3-D on the screen.  I printed off the fireworks page, as well as the animal cell picture and the disco bear picture.  For some reason or another, the kids thought the animal cell was gross.  Since they are only in 2nd-4th grades, they have not gotten into learning about the different parts of cells, but I was surprised to hear they thought it was gross. ???

Artist Trading Cards
I first learned about Artist Trading Cards about 4 or 5 years ago when I visited Art Snacks, a site ran by Kevin Honeycutt.  Since then, Artist Trading Cards have been part of my classroom.  I decided to introduce the Hornung Imagination Chapter to ATC's.  Like my students, they were drawn to them instantly and created, created, and created some more.  I even created a couple cards to trade with some of the kids!  Artist Trading Cards have an interesting history.  Check it out!

T-shirt Design, Logo, and Slogan

We are SO fortunate to have the creative talents and time of Mrs. Gates, who is a clothing designer and owner of Blue Platypus. Mrs. Gates has been a constant parent helper and creative idea generator for chapter meetings. Today she gave the kids a quick lesson on the importance of good design, and then she met with the kids in small groups to generate ideas for our Hornung Imagination Chapter t-shirts. Next week the chapter members are going to vote on their favorites! 

Finally, we took a peek into the Hour of Code for next week's meeting.  One of our students coded the tree lights for the Michigan tree in Washington, DC.  If you go to www.madewithcode.org, you can also be a part of the light design on the many trees representing the states.  The students were super pumped to wee this highlighted and excited for the Hour of Code next week. 

To close our meeting, I went over some contests that are out there for kids to try.  One of my edutech friends, Rushton Hurley, has an awesome site called Next Vista.  It is a wonderful site full of videos that are for kids...made by kids and teachers!  There are several video creation contests going on right now. Check them out! 

Mrs. Sroufe shared with me a contest created by the Paradigm Project with the American Red Cross with the aim to prevent home fires.  It is a really neat challenge-based activity that would be an awesome fit for our Imagination Chapter! Children can work alone or with a team, and the online program allows you to go along step-by-step with plenty of resources to help!  

For fun this month, they also have a photo challenge involving baking.  Kids can bake anything that spells out the word "Change", take a photo of it, post it, and get people to vote for it.  The top 10 photos win prize money!

All in all, our Imagination Chapter is still going strong, full of creativity, collaboration, and childhood fun!