Only One You Rock Garden

This year, we are creating a rock garden in memory of a wonderful teacher, Susan Griffith. Each person in the school will eventually contribute. Right now, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, are working on their rocks. We primed them with white acrylic paint first, gave them a coat or two of colored acrylic paint, and now the students are decorating them with paint pens. (We tried to paint designs in one class, and that didn't go so well!) I highly recommend paint pens for the small details. I also highly recommend Mexican Beach pebbles to paint. Most other kinds are WAY too rough and bumpy to have a good painting surface.

Before we started, we were given the book, Only One You, to read to the class. I liked showing the Youtube video below, and used the book for examples as to how to decorate their fish.
Here's the link to the youtube video below!
 Only One You YouTube

It has really good advice for being yourself and making the world a better place. 

Here's how we created ours!

↓↓↓↓↓↓↓

Like I said, we primed the rocks white, and then a color using acrylic paint.
Each table had their own color to paint.

The rocks on the right are the Mexican Beach Pebbles. They are SOOOO MUCH nicer and smoother than other rocks!!

After they finished their collaborative mural diamonds, they could start adding designs to their rocks with paint pens. We used U.S. Art Supply Paint Markers
I put this on the document reader, so they could remember the steps!

Here are some awesome finished 3-5th examples!

Here's some folks finishing up from Mrs. Kilby's class

Some Kindergartners from Mrs. Garcia's class!! Great job friends!

We'll continue to paint our designs on them, adding an eye later, and spraying them with a coat of clear acrylic gloss coating

Stay tuned for some more awesome ART!