Pine Cone Trees!!

 The past two weeks every grade level has been creating some fabulous winter artwork. One of my students, who is very interested in photography brought this fabulous horse to school and asked we could take a picture of Shrimp riding the horse. She spent a few of her recess periods creating the perfect backdrop with butcher paper and some of the glittered pine cone trees! It turned out fabulous as ever!! I love when my students come to school inspired!!

She set up the perfect backdrop for the perfect photo! 

You can see directions here:

Pine Cone Trees Directions

Third grade has had a blast using broken jewelery to create these snowy winder trees full of sparkle and bling! We painted them with green tempera, doused them in modpodge and covered them in glitter! 

After the glitter dried, I poured plaster paris on paper and stuck the trees in the plaster. When you mix up the plaster it is very liquidy, you must wait about 15-20 minutes for it to thicken so the tree will stand on its own in the plaster.

 Shrimp supervised from his easel and chirped orders at the kids!

                                                       We put a tiny star at the top

Making Trees

Today the girls collected a bag of pine cones to make Christmas trees to hand out on Christmas to family members. First we painted them green and added glitter. Forgot to take pictures, it was a bit messy, but we did it outside!

 Then I just mixed up a bucket of plater of paris and plopped a glob for each tree and let my daughter stick the trees in the "snow"

Plaster is so easy to use, just mix water and stir in a disposable container and it dried very quicky! We did it on wax paper. They were dry in about 20 minutes and ready to decorate. The tree sticks right it perfectly! It is inexpensive and dries nicely like snow!

We cut old necklaces to make the ornaments

They glued the ornaments on with Tacky Glue

Hope everyone has a wonderful New Year!!

And a very Merry Christmas!!

...And here's the cutest little 4 day old Santa you have ever seen from my newborn shoot Friday! I don't think you will need to leave him any cookies, he's pretty ridiculously sweet!!!