Family Clay Tiles

This post actually features 2 ideas I got from Pinterest. 

The first is a clay project I did with my class to go with out Family Unit.  After learning how to attach pieces of clay together, they had to cut our their tile and attach at least one heart (made with cookie cutters).  The idea I got from Pinterest was using pasta letters to make letter impressions.  The idea is that you press the letters in and they will burn off during the first firing in the kiln.  Students used the letters to spell out all members of their immediate family and some decided to include their last names as well.  I have smudged out some of the names for privacy concerns.

WARNING:  What the pins don't tell you is how much it stinks when the pasta is burning away!!!

Luckily for me our school kiln is not in my classroom but now I have to figure out a way to make it up to the grade 7 teacher for putting up with the temporary stench! 

This was the first time trying this technique so I let the kids choose if they wanted to try to keep the letters unglazed or use their brushes to get the glaze right in.  Now I see that I would prefer covering everything with the glaze because the colour is more consistent and it is much easier to read the names.

The second idea has you adding powdered jello or powdered juice to paint to make your art actually smell like the jello/juice.  You can see the original post here.

Our school is starting an amazing program after Spring Break called Project Chef.  As a school we wanted to kick off the program by creating food art for our hallway bulletin boards.  I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out. 

I changed to activity a little.  We used pastels to outline the strawberry shape and colour in the stems.  We also used pastels to colour in the seeds, instead of gluing on buttons.

It did actually work.  People would come into the classroom and say how nice it smelled.  But after awhile I couldn't smell it at all. I guess I got used to the scent.  I believe the scent didn't last too long though, but if you put the paper up to your face you could definitely smell it.  The kids loved holding their art up to their noses and enjoying the sweet smell!!