Undeniably Gorgeous Collaborative Flowers

Aren’t these just incredible?!

These were made by my 2nd graders!! And they turned out fantastic! It was a very simple process and a great end-of-the-year wrap up as the work is collaborative and therefor, no pass back!

First, students worked with watercolors.  We talked about analogous colors and how some colors mix well while others don’t.  From there, I had students use watercolor palettes to pick out 2 (3 if they wanted the challenge of knowing when to mix and not mix some) analogous colors (next to each other).  They then got a long piece of watercolor paper that they could experiment using the paint with.  What did more water do? What did less? What happens when you go back over an area with a lighter color?  It was full experimentation mode!

While these dried, we then used oil pastels in the same fashion, focusing on the warm colors.  We smeared, smudged, overlapped, layered, scraped and rolled our oil pastels to see what all they could do – and the best outcome is when the students realize the warm colors, too, are analogous with one another.

From there, we made our shapes.  Students created a petal shape (A pinched oval.) on the backside of their dried paintings and cut it out.  They then used that shape to trace as many as they could fit on their paper.  We did this same process with our oil pastel drawings using circles and talked about pollen (how it travels, etc).  The best part about this entire process is that it involves NO NAMES!  We talked about the importance of collaborative work and how in the end, since this is all coming together – it doesn’t matter who works on what because our end goal is the same.  So students began cutting out each others’ papers and helped one another without hesitation.

The next part was easy, of course – organizing the petals by color and the oil pastel circles into their own bins.

I took two large pieces of paper and taped them together to make a “canvas” and using school glue we placed the center pollen first and followed with the petals.  Students wanted the rainbow effect so we just began to organize the pieces as we went. We placed the outer most petals first and then worked towards the center because of the glue but however you want to do it.   It was like a puzzle when we put it together! They turned out incredible! One for each class and we can use them for many different displays! It was a lot easier than perhaps their magnificence portrays but I’m in love!!