Clay heart project!

I love this project because it is really good for very young children. These little hearts were created by Kindergarten students after I did a illustration presentation with them. I use this project to go along with my book "Meet Genna and Russ, The Generous Kids." www.gennarusskids.com The story is about these two little goats who give, care and share and I designed this project to go along with one of the messages of the book, which is "giving makes your heart smile." All you need is some polymer clay in different colors, a heart cookie cutter, rolling pin, wax paper, drinking straw. To make this project: Choose the heart color, roll out clay to 1/4" thickness, cut heart shape with cutter. Put on wax paper, add two little balls of different color clay for eyes, add small coil for mouth. Mix different colors together to make the candy stripe coil that frames the hearts. Use drinking straw to punch hole for string to pass through. Bake according to manufacturer directions in your oven. Enjoy!

Ice Cream Ornaments

Looking for something fun to do with the kids? How about making some ice cream ornaments. All you need is some sculpey clay in fun colors and off you go!

The Final Mural the other 50 feet!

This is the other end of the wall mural all completed.


In this undersea part of the mural fish dance to the tunes coming out of the coral.

The Final Mural

These are pictures of the finished mural.
It is about 100' long so it is hard to get it in one picture.
I am putting a series of pictures of the sections.

The mural wall starts out with a garden of huge flowers and the school banner. The focus of the school teaching is reflected in all of the imagery that went into the mural. We included a quote, "Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future" by John F. Kennedy. One of my favorite things I incorporated in the mural design was that every student who worked on the mural "signed" it with their hand print in the grass. While I was helping them put their hand print on the wall I asked them to remember what was around their hand print so that when they grew up they could find their hand print. I hope it is on the wall a long time!





One of the funny things that happened with the garden part of the mural is that even though the students wanted broccoli in their garden. No one wanted to paint it!

Wall Mural painting in progress

Whew!!! The major school mural project took 6 months total to complete. Along the way I taught the students Gr 2-5) how to enlarge drawings using the grid method and ratio. They delighted in being able to be a part of the planning, brainstorming and painting. It was a great experience for the students, teachers and myself. This community project included over 200 people pitching in to paint and be a part of creating this work of art for the school. In the end it took a couple of months of detail painting on my own to make the final artwork sparkle. I hope you enjoy the murap progress pictures.