"The Journey" 

Watercolor and masking tape on cotton paper

The Oaks love to create and try every material we have in the studio- sticks, recycled materials, paints, collage materials, glue and especially TAPE!

We quickly started collecting materials to do “creation challenges” during our check in time. We documented their ideas in the Oaks Book of Challenges where we added pictures and dictations of what they made, and we kept the book on the classroom book shelf. The Oaks would look at this book often and talk amongst themselves about the different things they made and why. We would see them on the couch with the binder open, laughing together as they turned the pages! They really loved to laugh and be silly together!

In addition to creation challenges the Oaks loved to paint with watercolors. So for this collaborative project we started by adding some tape first, and then we painted with bold and saturated watercolor paints in small trays with brushes. The children worked hard to cover most of the empty spaces and they were eager to add more detail, so we added some white circle prints on top! They love projects where they can complete different steps over multiple days.  The final piece looks so beautiful in the frame and everytime we look at this we think about our journey together as the Oaks class!

Beautifully framed courtesy of FTCNS parent, Ross Marten, from The Alley Gallery in Evanston. www.thealleygallery.com