Dot Day Sculptures

Thanks to the alignment of our calendar and curriculum map this year, we're celebrating DOT DAY at the end of our "Colors All Around" unit.  We've learned about primary colors, secondary colors and shades, and have been identifying shapes and types of lines.  Searching for a dimensional art project that would be a great summary to the unit AND a link to Peter H. Reynold's beloved book, I stumbled across this video from Cassie Stephens, a wonderful art teacher:

... and EUREKA!  Give the pieces of paper FEET!  Wanting to see, hear and read more, I discovered Cassie's blog here, and wouldn't you know it, she has lots of beautiful projects for Dot Day that she's shared! 

Inspired by her paper line sculptures, I decided to adapt Cassie's project to include ONLY the primary, secondary and shade colors that we've learned about and used in our unit.  As it was the first time I was introducing sculpture and dimension into a class project, I decided to prep materials in advance, so that my students could spend most of their time experimenting with folding and gluing. I used 9 inch square white construction paper for the background, and about an 8 inch diameter black paper circle for our main "dot."

A school die cut circle block created the medium size circles in red, yellow and blue, but I also added some smaller yellow circles (after an unfortunate yet not terribly surprising spill accident) created with a paper punch.  The line pieces were our secondary colors, orange, green and purple, cut into 1 inch by 12 inch strips.

After rereading The Dot, reviewing our colors and color vocabulary, I modeled how to first add our primary colored dots to the black one, making sure to remind my Stars to glide their glue near-ish (see what I did there, Peter H. Reynold's fans?) to the edge so that none of the dots would curl up and away from the background.  Then the creation of "feet" began, and the Stars were ~entranced~ by the folding of their secondary colored lines.  When they saw the first strip of paper raised above the dot yet still attached to it, they were HOOKED.

The only other instruction I gave my students was to keep the primary and secondary colored pieces of their sculpture within/inside the black dot.  They loved this activity, and I suspect that I'm going to see a lot more dimension and height in their crafty creations for the remainder of the year!  

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