If you are looking for some new art center ideas for your classroom, look no further! Today I’m going to share with you 5 art centers my students have been enjoying lately.
After visiting two choice-based art classrooms, I’ve decided to incorporate some free choice days into my class schedule. I think it is important to let students try out different art materials and ideas at their own pace. However, I am still continuing my art curriculum and will teach whole-class projects throughout the year, interspersed with some free choice days.
1. Beads, Wire and Pipe Cleaners. What can you make with these materials? I have two large plastic jars: one of wire pieces and one of pipe cleaner pieces. You know when you open a bag of pipe cleaners, use them for a project and are left with some small pieces & curled stems and it’s really hard to get them back in the bag? When I have those, I throw them into this leftover pipe cleaner jar. Same thing with wire pieces. The beads also just seem to multiply overnight. I have never bought beads at school.. people just keep donating them. This station was really popular for kids to make jewelry or random things.
2. Crayola Marker Airbrush Set
I am planning to use these later in the year and have the kids design and cut out their own stencils.
3. Some students just love the opportunity to free draw. I put out some of my favorite drawing books such as Big Book of Cartooning
4. Waba Fun Kinetic Sand . This stuff is so cool! It just feels really strange.. indescribable. It is like wet sand, but doesn’t dry. It will hold it’s shape fairly well and won’t make a huge mess everywhere. It is easy to scoop up and put away. Just put it on a tray and you are ready for some indoor fun. I don’t know why it costs so much on Amazon… I bought the same package at a local teacher store for about $15. Check out some other online stores before you buy it.
5. Model Magic Modeling Compound
Do any of these ideas sound fun to you? Do you have any tried-and-true center ideas?
I have more center ideas to share with you that I will write about it a future post.
I am thinking of incorporating a free choice session in the middle of each term next year. I teach art to grade 3-6 and thought that I could put out a set of activity centres and use them across the grade levels all week thus giving all the chn a free choice session and myself a quiet week with little intervention in what the chn are doing, as opposed to every other session when I am on my feet and in action the whole time. I love using model magic and with a whole class I have successfully integrated it with painting by creating a three dimensional element to go on a painting.
It is light enough that once dry and painted the glued model magic pieces actually stay on the paintings on cartridge paper without a problem. This year my grade 3 students have painted awesome vases of sunflowers with one of the sunflower heads made of model magic, in the style of Vincent van Gogh. Last year the grade 3 students made a small model of themselves screaming after painting a background in the same style as Edvard Munch’s famous work. Some of these were hilarious. So you don’t need a lot of this expensive material to go round a whole grade if you are only making one element of a piece of work. I only ever buy white model magic as it is so easy to paint.