I have always loved the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and thought this would make a great interdisciplinary lesson to do at my school. I teamed up with one of the really great teachers at my school and started this month long project. She read the book in class and did other lessons that focused on the things that happened in the book and food in general.
I introduced the students to the Pop artist Claus Oldenburg and his giant food sculptures. The students started to get really excited when I told them we would be making our own art based on the book and Oldenburg. For the food sculptures we would make as a class I had pre-made all the armatures out of cardboard and newspaper. We then worked together to cover the bases with strips of newspaper and paper mache paste. This took many days and was very messy, but the students loved to smooth the paper on to the forms. (I swore I would never do paper mache again, but that only lasted three weeks before I was cat it again.) After the food dried we painted each piece to look like real food. We even used colored paper to represent lettuce and cheese on our burger.
In class the students also watched the Movie version of the book and read the sequel, Pickles to Pittsburgh.
I can't wait to display this at the school wide art show this Friday.
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4 comments:
wonderful !!
great group project.
Thank You!
Can you explain how you made them at such a large scale - my kids would love this.
thanks
These are terrific, I have done giant food and giant zoo animals for several years, with art students in summer camp format and at local ymca, I have found that masking tape is the secret and newspaper, we open up newspaper and bunch it with as much masking tape to make shapes we use other recyled materials as needed. Bulletin board paper was the easiest for the giant paper food. We have had everything from nachos, to giant box of dots (with big yogurt containers as support for dots.) to giant lemonade with clear contact paper for glass. I haven't done it with special needs, but in summer camp, 5 days 2 hours a day. Day one we get inspiration from food mags, I find this helps them conceptualize the work and stimulates ideas
we also work on paper skills like curling etc. Then building, most kids get one major project done in the 5 days with also helping on a couple of group projects. The engineering skills are so important. with Giant animals we use all kinds of things and lots of masking tape and newpaper. we cover with tape for young ones and then paint, older kids can cover with paper towel paper mache style or my favorite is strips of fabric, dipped in liquid starch. beautiful, we have had a 7 ft giraffe done by a 10 year old and covered in yellow sheets with white daisy, and black lines(retro from 70's) Big yards of fabric help so they don't look like patchwork, but that could work also. Had a 9 foot long dragon, done by 11 year old I watched her bite off more than she had time with, but then came in extra hours to get it done, recruited help from familiy, but maintained her design choices, she project managed it like a pro, engineering experience and time management priceless. We continually find new ways to try and push these. I even did it in a 6 week course with 1 and 1/2 hour each week and kids maintained their interest and enthusiasm the whole time. Even the 6 year olds.
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