Bottle Cap Artwork

The last 2 weeks have been dedicated to bottle cap artwork with my 4th-6th grade students. The students were, overall, very engaged and excited. I only had a couple panels planned out ahead of time, the rest were designed by small groups of students. The students designed the panels by arranging caps on the boards (a few were large cardboard pieces, most were foam core panels the daughter-in-law of a teacher pulled out of the trash bin at her office) to see if it would work. When they were "done", I checked and made suggestions. If it passed inspection, I moved the panel from a table to a "gluing station". We used glue guns, which went very well considering it was the first time some of the students used a glue gun. I know that hot glue is not going to be a permanent fixative for these panels, but it was cheaper than buying boards and screws. I'm hoping they'll last at least a couple years if handled with care. I have no idea how many glue sticks we used, but it was a lot! I think we went through 100 mini glue sticks just yesterday and today (9 classes).

We ran out of a few colors today and had to improvise a bit. One panel, that because a little unrecognizable after the gluing, was disassembled so we could use the caps again. Purple seemed to be the least common color. We still have tons of red caps that our wonderful lunch room workers saved, and even washed for me!

This was definitely a team effort. Some students were painting backgrounds while others were arranging, and still more were gluing. The next class picked up where the previous class left off. I told the students if they were being responsible, respectful, and working quietly, I would let them choose how to contribute. I really only had to redirect a few! The bad part of this process, was that a small group might have worked really hard to make an awesome design, and had to trust someone else to finish it. It was fine most of the time, but not all my students put as much work into good craftsmanship. The baseball, pictured above, did not so much resemble a baseball in the end. It kept getting more and more lopsided when students were not putting the cap back exactly where it came from.

This was a problem solving opportunity. At first the "create" sign was in all red letters. Nobody could read it, so we changed to a rainbow color scheme and filled the background with white, which just so happened to be our most plentiful color.

When I looked at the end of the day, I was so impressed with what my students accomplished! 

 Only a couple of these were my ideas. I said no KU or KSU signs, and it obviously had to be school-appropriate. Some ideas didn't come together and were not glued. These were the panels that ended up being finished!

Gold Fish

American Flag

Titanic

Golf Ball

Moon and Stars

Red Flower

Cat (it became a little disfigured when glued)

Shine

Dog

Snail

Flower

Apple

Fruit

Tree

Pac Man

Breast Cancer Ribbon

Love

Yin Yang 

Art