We made Mandalas! Slideshow, Instructions, & Video.

We made Mandalas in Fifth grade to reiterate some radial design/balance info and complex patterns and repetition.  I included a little of the art history/cultural information too.

This project also knocked out our diocesan assessment, AND was supposed to be a good warm up for our collaborative church auction project. An awesome gel glue batik quilt! But, the best laid plans... 

I started out with this slideshow discussing what we were going to be doing.   I took photos from the internet, and turned it into a slideshow teaching what I wanted to teach.  I DID cite my sources at the end though!

I knew the concept itself wasn't going to be confusing for them, but actually making the mandala would be a little more difficult. I wrote out instructions - and even as I was writing them, I kept getting confused. If I was getting confused, I knew my fifth graders would have no hope. So, I made this video. The idea is always to show it to them first, and then have it stop and go as we work on it together.

 

The video definitely helped, but what doesn't help is not having light boxes when you are trying to trace.  All and all we got through it!  Here is the entire Artsonia Gallery.

Once this project was in the books, I set forth to complete the mandala gel glue batiks I was hoping would come together into a neato quilt for our Class Auction Project for our church gala.  Well.  I only see these friends once a week for 40 minutes... on a Monday... and we ended up having two Monday snow days and I was even sick one of the Mondays too.  The quilt never made it to fruition, but the small batiks did!

We transferred our original mandala to the fabric with glue during one class (I had xerox copied them) and painted with acrylic the next 2 classes.  I then took them home and soaked them in hot water, and threw them in my washer's rinse cycle!  I was so done with mandala's, I didn't want to spend another week on radial design!! 

That would have been a pretty funky quilt!  Right? Anyway, my washer seems to still be working fine. While much of this was going on, we also had a circular weaving on a CD project that they mostly worked on independently.  

I swear, if this class does not know what radial design is after this trimester... I am going to lose it!