Award and working with nails

Wow! I woke up this morning, and there was a message from Lilian at Me Teach Good. She has given me the One Lovely Blog Award. How awesome is that?? Thanks Lilian!

I now need to find 15 bloggers to give the award to as well. I'll be on the look out for some Lovely Blogs.

Today I picked up the book Life of Pi. I am half way through another novel, that just isn't keeping me interested. I might start Life of Pi tomorrow. Hmmm....


 I took some courses this June for technical work, art and PE for the lower grades. Remember? I have to teach PE as well.

This was one of the projects we made in the technical workshop:

 Here is another idea made by another teacher at the course:

Here are the details of this project:

Materials needed -
- 2x4 wood pieces
- finishing nails
- hammer
- color pencils
- tempura paint (watered down)
- string or wire
- glue
- saw (optional)

1) Using 2x4 pieces of wood (mine was about 8in. long), come up with a design that you can  draw right onto the wood piece. Here are two ideas shown. Another idea is a sail boat, and using the nails for either the base of the boat or the sail. In the course, we had to saw our own piece of wood. If you have a shop room, maybe you could do this.

2) Color with colored pencils and paint. When painting, we watered down the tempura paint. On my windmill, the blue background is watered down blue paint. The rest was colored with color pencils.

3) When the drawing part is complete, then decide how many nails you will need for the section of your project. Hammer away! Don't hammer all the way down, or you won't be able to wrap your string/wire properly around them.

4) Weave your string or wire around the nails. On the windmill, I first weaved the string only on the outline of the blades. Unfortunately, I felt that it didn't give the 3D effect I wanted. So then I undid it and weaved so that the string intersected through the blades. This made it pop out more. I changed the color from red to orange and then back to red. When adding more string just tie on a new piece of string, and then glue down the ends that might be flying away.

5) Done!

This is an excellent project to allow little one to try out working with wood, hammer and nails.  The animal cage idea would maybe be the easiest and fun for lower grade children.