Plenty

The damp Texas weather does not deter our resident squirrel as she stocks up for the winter. Plenty of acorns to choose from.

Spiders!

You are never too old for Halloween fun. Something about this holiday inspires you to be silly and creative. That is if you were raised with a Halloween like I was; where it was all about spooky stories, slightly scary but harmless costumes, hay rides, bonfires and trick or treat candy you did not have to check. Period. No other meanings implied or intended. Having said that, I broke out the pipe cleaner spider project just as a way of reminding myself that the Halloween of the past can still be recreated in my room. Yes, you can make a science curriculum connection in the study of arachnids…blah, blah, blah….I want to make slightly trembly spiders on hot glue spider webs, because they make people squeal and they are cute.

Can we just be kids in the art room for a second? Okay.

Here’s what you need for each spider.

• 4 pipe cleaners
• 16 beads

Here’s what you need for the spider web.

• adult supervision to use the hot glue gun
• a background of some kind – I like black foam board
• hot glue gun and hot glue sticks

To make the spider:

1. Get 4 pipe cleaners and bend in half.
2. Cross over half the legs. make sure that the body loop is no bigger than a quarter. Short-legged spiders are not as cute.
3. Twist the legs under the loop at least 3 times so the legs won’t come undone. Place the body of the spider on the table and bend the legs up so that you can separate 4 on each side.
4. Add 8 of the beads close to the body.
5. With the spider still on its back bend the knees in the same place on each leg and position the second bead on each leg above the knee.
6. Turn the spider over and spread the legs for balance. 4 to the front, 4 to the back. By the way this fashion maven spider sports the Mineral Wells Ram colors.

Spider webs are just hot glue applied to a black foam board. Make glue lines out from a corner and then half circles that cut across.  If you want your spider to stay put on the web, apply him while the glue is still sticky.

Scarecrows are My Clowns

You remember when drawing clowns was a good thing? I grew up in a time when Emmett Kelly and Red Skelton were still known and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey clowns were not scary. They were funny and sad at the same time. But not scary. I drew lots of clowns as a child.

Now, you say clown in a classroom and the entire room shudders and bursts into horrific descriptions of the clowns they know. So I substitute these scarecrows. For most fourth graders, scarecrows are still an innocent reminder of the farm, fall and the pumpkin patch. I have a wooden stand in my room where we build a life-size scarecrow some years, but most of the time I use a tabletop scarecrow I bought years ago as a model.

We draw BIG, we start in pencil, outline in sharpie, then crayon for the body and watercolor for the background. The watercolor is a relief at the end because it takes a LONG time to color large sheets of manila paper. Good conversations about color, geometric shaped patches and French fry fingers and feet are had. I hope the movie industry and the news media will leave scarecrows alone.

My back porch scarecrow.