Easter Art School Holiday Project

I'm currently trying to develop my Teacher portfolio. It's one of those projects that I have a ton of ideas for, but most of them are still in my head and I'm struggling to get them down onto paper, or the computer. In the midst of that it is school holidays and I'd like to do some fun stuff with my kids. So.....

Miss10 and I decided to create a piece of art using Easter egg wrappers. It's something I've wanted to do for ages and also something that I think would be fun, and engaging for kids in a classroom around Easter time. It also fits with a reuse theme, so rather than throwing away the wrappers, you make something fun and visually stimulating. (This is my link to the cross curriculum priority of 'Sustainability' in the Australian Curriculum) :)

Here is the result of several hours of our time... Miss10, being a hoarder like her Mum, had previously saved wrappers and stored them in her craft box, so we had a great stash to start with. She came up with the idea of a rainbow and given the selection of colours we had it seemed a perfect subject matter.

We started by arranging them in colour order.

We did a rough sketch of our rainbow design, including a pot and a cloud.

We then started sticking the colours down using a collage technique.

 Then came our cloud

 and our pot

and some grass

and a couple of chicks, who we made slightly 3D by packing them with some offcuts.

And finally, some gold for our pot

Now, to add to the educational element (and art in itself is a wonderfully crucial aspect of education) I decided to have Miss10 write a poem to accompany the art piece.

Cinquain poetry was introduced to me at uni recently so we googled that and found the main rules for writing this sort of poetry. Essentially, it should have 5 lines.
The first should have 2 syllables
The second should have 4 syllables
The third should have 6 syllables
The fourth shoud have 8 syllables and
The fifth (and final) should have 2 syllables.

Furthermore, each line can follow a format of:
Subject
Description
Action
Feeling
Conclusion

With these general principles, Miss10 came up with a poem to accompany our art:

Easter
Rainbow of hope
Into the clouds it goes
Birds chirping at the colourful
Rainbow

Here are the rough drafts

Here is the finished masterpiece:

Integrating art and poetry means I have ticked off on a couple of aspects of Ausvels (level 5 for this purpose since that is the year my daughter is in), including:

English (Writing - literacy):
Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive print and multimodal texts, choosing textstructures, language features, images and sound appropriate to purpose and audience (ACELY1704)
The Arts (working toward level 6, Creating and Making)
At Level 6, students independently and collaboratively experiment with and apply a range of skills, techniques and processes using a range of media, materials, equipment and technologies to plan, develop, refine, make and present arts works. They investigate a range of sources to generate ideas and manipulate arts elements, principles and/or conventions in a range of arts disciplines and forms as they explore the potential of ideas

So, my fun activity with my daughter has resulted in something I can possibly include in my Teacher Portfolio. Win - win... and as I continue with my work, she is searching for a second art project to work on, and already talking about writing a Haiku to go with that one!