LESSON OVERVIEW 

BIG IDEA 

The exploration of colors, textures, and shapes for the pursuit of self-expression.  

DESCRIPTION

 Students will use their sensory skills to transform pumpkins in a way that helps them understand themselves better and celebrate the in-between of Halloween and Thanksgiving. They will be using materials like yarn, paint, feathers, googly eyes, puffballs, and other textured fabrics to decorate a pumpkin. They will inculcate a deeper understanding of who they are by the creations they make as they express themselves by decorating the pumpkins.  

ESSENTIAL UNDERSTANDING

The big idea of this project is that students will continue to explore their sensory skills to create textures from craft materials and found materials like fabrics, paint, yarn, googly eyes, puffballs, etc. 

INTENDED OUTCOMES 

• Students will learn to decorate a three-dimensional object with a variety of craft materials.

• Students will learn to create facial features on pumpkins and experiment with materials they have not used before.

• Students will be able to reflect on their works as a group and share what was important and meaningful to them. 

SKILLS / TECHNIQUES

• Students will use various materials like pumpkins, yarn, paint, feathers, googly eyes, puffballs, and other textured fabrics to decorate a pumpkin.  to create three-dimensional art.

• Students will learn how to use hot glue guns to join different materials to create three-dimensional art.

• Students will be able to think of using different craft materials to decorate pumpkins into their desired character or design.  

VOCABULARY

-Organic shapes

-Three-Dimensional Art

-Texture

-Experimentation

DOCUMENTATION 

OVERVIEW

 For this lesson, students will continue to explore their self-expression through color texture, and shapes. Colors and textures can evoke emotions and memories and exploring rough, soft, bumpy textures could help them connect their tactile experiences with their emotions. In this lesson, students will decorate pumpkins that will represent their creative identity.

TEACHER EXAMPLE

ENGAGEMENT 

As the students entered the room one by one, we saw everyone was excited about seeing the teacher's examples of the pumpkins that were decorated and all of them were excited to create their own. They stayed engaged from start to finish of the project as there was an ample amount of choice of materials available for everybody to use the materials, they were most excited about. With just a little bit of encouragement or suggestions about what could be added to the project, everyone ran with their own ideas and created their own unique versions of pumpkin people. The best part was seeing how excited everyone was when we did the gallery walk and how everyone complimented each other on how beautiful everyone else's work was.

WHAT WENT WELL

• Proper planning related to how the pumpkin would be decorated and getting all the craft materials ready in advance helped the class immensely.

• Leaving a paper plate under the pumpkins was beneficial in keeping the area clean and some of these students even used the paper plates as part of the decoration.

• Having teacher examples on each table helps encourage the students to create their own versions well.

• The pumpkin project was timely based on it being presented between Halloween and Thanksgiving which encouraged all these students to actively participate.

• Providing glue on every table before the start of the class was helpful in avoiding some of the starting problems.

IMPROVEMENTS 

• Making sure that the Bluetooth speaker was charged beforehand would have been helpful in playing music as this speaker was dead when we wanted to use it.

• Buying three more extra pumpkins would have been helpful as two of them became squishy by the time we had to use them.

• The gallery walk could have been planned organized and implemented better than we did.

• Having better glue and paint would have also been beneficial. 

STUDENT WORK