Tissue Paper flowers

I am slowly going through my pictures of our projects throughout the year....hopefully I get them all up over the summer! These are pictures of the flower hairpieces that we made in May. We made them in the colors of the Mexican flag to go hand in hand with our wonderful Spanish teacher's end of year lessons.

During our Spring Showcase the girls wore these in their hair when they performed a traditional Mexican dance they learned. I am usually not a crafty art teacher and I typically don't like step by step instructions (although it's a great thing for kids to learn to follow directions.....I just use my 45 minutes a week with them for creativity ;)) but it gave me the opportunity to discuss the difference between fine art, craft and folk art. It also gave me a ton of inspiration and I launched a Mexican folk art lesson after this flower project (more on that later).

Working with the tissue paper was pretty tricky so it was a good experience for them to cut such lightweight paper, staple it and manipulate it. Needless to say, most of the boys weren't thrilled to make flowers ;). I struck a deal that if they made one flower they could use the rest of the art period to go back to working on their snow leopard masks. Worked like a charm!!