Two More Craft Activities for 6th Graders

Sparkly painted pine cones.

You need lots of craft/tempera paint.

And some thin wire, or some other means of making a loop or hook on the bottom of the pine cones.

And, of course, lots and lots of pine cones! These were donated by a staff member at work. She was glad to be rid of them. Many still had stems attached, and we wound the wires around these. It's useful to hold the cones by their wires, and later that's how you hang them as well.

I had some small boxes already destined for recycling. Students put a piece of stiff craft paper in the bottom of the box, squirted some paint colors in, and them shook the pine cone gently in there, getting paint all over it.

Next I had some small plastic bins with sparkly craft sand, and they rolled the paint-wet cones in the sand for a little sheen.

The last step is to tip a few of the cone points with glitter glue. That gives a nice effect.
This project was pure chaos with 18 6th graders, I'll admit, and they used up lots of paint and almost all the glitter glue. That's 6th graders! That was our craft before Thanksgiving.

This next project we did this past week. I wanted to teach some interested students (about 8 of them) how to do a wax resist. Basically, wax resist is applying wax to paper before painting, so the paint soaks in everywhere except where the wax is, leaving it white. I tried using waxed paper (no luck), and crayons (no luck) to get the wax on the paper. What worked best was a candle, for goodness sakes!
This is generally what I was hoping to accomplish with the students: wax underneath, star stickers applied, paint wash, sprinkling of salt, remove stars, a little glitter glue. I wrote "starry" with the candle first.

The only old candle in my house, which seems quite hard to believe!

I bought supplies because the leftovers we had at work we woefully inadequate to this task.
Glitter:

Watercolor paper (essential!), wide brushes, and glitter:

Yet more glitter glue:

Lots of craft paint:

I impressed on the kids that the paint had to be quite watery to achieve the washed look, but they kept wanting to paint with it.

These are some of their best. You can see that the wax resist method did not work -- the only reason you can read their words is because they used a gray crayon. The candle-written words did not show.

 But they had a great time, and the star-removal part worked well.

 And honestly, glitter makes everything good.