Recycled Paper Ornaments

Mrs. Taylor over at School at St. George Place shared this awesome idea for ornaments made from recycled magazine pages!!! I decided to try it out with my 4th and 5th graders who were finished early with their painting unit, and oooohhh it turned out so great!!!

We used our massive collection of bottle caps to trace circles of various sizes and glued them together with glue sticks. A few students even glued them to large plastic lids to make them more sturdy! Also, some students glued them onto a square of colored paper instead of making an ornament - that looked great too! Check out the whole lesson plan on Mrs. Taylor's site... Thanks for the great idea!!! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Recently (or almost!) Finished Art Units using Recycled Materials!

Find out more about these recent GREEN works of art made by the talented students at Briargrove. Check them out here on the Briargrove Art Blog!

4th Grade - Birds made from recycled materials!!! (images of finished birds soon to come!)

5th Grade - Animals made out of cardboard food boxes!!!

2nd Grade - Toilet Paper Roll Garden!!!

Kindergarten - Clouds made from cardboard and other recycled materials!!! (Finished clouds coming soon!)

3rd Grade - Plants made from paper scraps!!! (Will post finished plants this week!)

Great work! The students are loving it and really making an impact on their environment!

Soda Tab Bracelets!

Fourth grade student, Milena, wowed me with a really cool way to reuse soda tabs for jewelry!


Her cousin taught her this cool technique in which ribbons are weaved through soda tabs to connect them into a beautiful bracelet.

You can see the detailed weaving in this shot.

Here is another work-in-progress. Milena is planning on wearing this one for Halloween!

Here's the artist modeling her work! So beautiful and intricate! And fashionable as well! This is a great reminder that jewelry is an art form, too. What other recycled materials could you use to make unique jewelry? Please share your ideas with us in a comment, or bring your work to show me in the art room!
Thanks for sharing Milena!

A Recycled-Robot!

Raka in the fifth grade brought in this awesome sculpture that he made at home with recycled materials. Not only does his robot look super cool, it looks super friendly, too!

He used an egg carton for a body, water bottles for legs,

a Sprite box for the arms, hands, and feet,

and a Styrofoam to-go box and bottle caps for the head! He used clear packing tape to securely join his robot together.

Thanks for sharing your work with us Raka!!!

Abstract Composition using Bottle Caps

For the past two weeks in the art room, all grade levels have been working on these beautiful abstract compositions.

This is our first unit of the year using recycled materials, and in this case we were using them as tools. We traced a variety of our collected bottle caps to create the circles in the compositions. We have been collecting the caps for other projects later in the year, but this was a fun way to make art with them in the meantime. To keep the bottle caps clean (so we can use them later), each table shared a Kleenex to wipe the marker off after each tracing. To be green, each table shared ONE Kleenex, and often the same Kleenex was used for multiple classes, until it was so warn out we had to dispose of it. (We made sure everyone knew not to use it for blowing noses or anything like that!)

At clean-up many students had marker on their hands, and many of them wanted to wash it off. To keep from wasting the water and paper towels, I told the students we would not be washing hands. Marker is messy, but not dirty - a distinction the students could understand. Your hands might not look pristine, but they don't really need to be washed (unless you are about to eat.) The students did, however, get a squirt of hand-sanitizer as they left to help get rid of any germs since they were sharing so many materials and handling the bottle caps.

Visit the Briargrove Elementary Art Page to see more examples of the artwork and to learn more about the art concepts incorporated into the unit!

A GREEN Art Car!

This awesome car was made at home by kindergartner Zack Barrera, with some help from his father! He used bottle caps, straws, toothpicks, and a paper towel roll to construct this moving vehicle (and it rolls smoothly, too!) The fiery red paint makes it look extra fast!

I love that my students are going home and using the ideas we talked about in class to come up with their own unique creations! There are SO many possibilities when using found and recycled materials, I'm so glad you are exploring them outside the limits of the classroom.

Please continue to share ideas and show us what you've made! Great job, Zack!

Recycled Paper Art!!!!

Two of my very talented and dedicated first grade students Carter and Eleanor started working on this awesome collage during their free time in my art room last week. Carter started it, then they worked on it together, and then Eleanor took it home and finished it! There is ribbon and wrapping paper on it too. It's about as tall as a first grader!

How cool to see my students taking what they do in here and expanding on it at home! Thanks for sharing your work with me!

An Artistic and Eco-Friendly Gift

I am so excited that my students are already so creative and enthusiastic when it comes to being green. Just a day after I taught her class, one of my students went home and made this. She reused cardboard from a food box, cut it open, folded, and hot-glued it to make a really cool hanging pencil cup. She also attached some safety pins so I could hang something from it. Isn't that creative? And useful!


Great idea Caroline!