Live and Learn, the Art Edition

Yesterday, I tried to do something crafty. As in arts-and-crafts-y. I love art, drawing and painting and all that and i teach it every week. I give one of my coworkers merry hell about using paper plates for all her "art" when those are really craft projects.

I do the paper plate stuff for the hallway just to be a joiner but it's not where my heart lies. I like to get the kids into abstract expressionism and playing with crayon resists and stuff. However if it looks like the least bit of fun, I'll try it once. And this one was a one-time trial.

I started with a cardboard tube salvaged from wrapping paper at the holidays. The idea was to slice it up and let the kids make heart stamps out of their segments, dip them in paint and stamp away to their little hearts' content with a sense of accomplishment that they made the shape themselves from a found object.

Sweet, right?

The reality was that I couldn't cut the rigid tube with my school scissors at all so I opened a pair of student scissors wide and accidentally dug the blade into my hand in an attempt to saw a ragged chunk off the damn tube.

Then I bummed an x-acto knife off a kindergarten teacher. With trial and error I discovered that slicing cardboard like carrots left to bumpy an edge so I needed to saw short strokes as I rotated the tube. I got pretty good at it by the time I'd done twenty of them.

I showed the kids what to do with them, gave them colored paper and the very last of my tempera paint and let them go to it. By the time I got back to my desk from passing out the paper, they were finished. They covered a sheet of paper in less than one clock minute. I gave them one more sheet of paper and told them to think about their design, etc. in hope of slowing them down so I could bask in their joy at my devotion and craftiness but by the time I'd reached for the mouse to turn on their classroom music, they were through and asking if they could wash their hands.

I was awfully proud of myself for about nine seconds though.

So either it's a fascinating craft for much younger children (who might eat paint or stamp their tongues?) or it's an utterly pointless exercise.What a damn waste of time.