At Samuel Playground, the group Miss Ashlyn and I see are only boys, because the girls have a Girl Scout program. With that being said, a few of the older boys are easily disinterested in art projects because they are spending a lot of time in the pool, and out of the field. While most of them really had fun with all of the projects, I wanted to engage everyone.
We broke them into two teams, and each team had to build a strong village.
“What does a village of people need in order to survive?” I asked.
They named mostly everything, such as food, shelter, water streams, PEOPLE, animals, and they also needed to protect themselves, therefore they said swords. They would need to decide amongst themelves who would be in charge of what, because that is how a village functions, everyone has a craft, or specialty.
Materials
Tinfoil to soft sculpt people, animals, and objects.
Yellow-envelopes houses for shelter
Cut-out trees, stencils to texture the water,
White paper for walls of village/fort
Poster paper for the base
Crayons, markers, etc.
This exercise brought them all together, working collaboratively. We had never seen them so task-oriented, and focused on teamwork! They took it very seriously when someone was slacking on their job! They also made dragons to fly over the trees as protectors, and kings for the villages. They went as far as making bananas out of tinfoil. It was truly amazing to see what their little minds came up with!
