Collaborative Circles

The students at St. Luke's and I have been working on an art project I call "Collaborative Circles." I started by giving each student a square piece of paper with a quarter of a circle drawn in it.

For the younger students--Grade 1st through 3rd---I next had them color their square with crayons.When they finished, I assembled the quarter circles into one big circle....

The young students were quite surprised and excited when they saw how their drawing could make a "collaborative" bigger art piece. We then talked about what the word collaboration meant and how it felt to collaborate with a fellow classmate.

 

With grade 4th through 6th, I wanted to do something a bit more complicated. I handed out the quarter circles, and drew some patterns on the board. I told them I wanted them to draw similar patterns on their quarter circles, and showed them an example I had created. I first had the students draw their designs in pencil, then trace over the pencil with a black permanent marker.

then the students used colored pencils to color their designs

When we assembled the quarter circles into larger complete circles the results were quite wonderful! Again we discussed the word "collaboration" and how it felt to collaborate with fellow students. We also talked about how we all sometimes collaborated with people in other areas of our lives, and the advantages and disadvantages to collaborating.

The older students also were quite amazed by how their individual drawing changed when it was assembled into a larger drawing....and were quite pleased with their collaborative results.

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