Flora and Fauna Program Details

The Concept

Here’s a creative way to help clean up our planet: make art from single-use plastic bags. Just collecting them for a few weeks will give you a myriad of colors, thicknesses, patterns and textures. The kids will create flowers, trees, animals or nature scenes from single-use plastic. The colors and graphics on single-use plastic packaging will be cut up and arranged into colorful and textural artworks.

The Materials

Single-use plastic packaging (plastic shopping bags, plastic packaging from supermarket items such as paper towels, toilet paper, bread bags, etc), scissors and glue sticks; needle and embroidery thread for older participants.

The How

It all starts with a presentation. The visiting artist meets with the group to explain the project, read a story and show examples of what they need to collect for materials. The presentation takes just under a half hour and multiple participating classes can be scheduled one after the other. The visiting artist leaves a large bin for material collection in the classroom. The kids usually need about a week to collect the materials, longer time may be scheduled to work within the school districts schedule. 

Once the materials are collected the artist returns to guide the children through making the artwork.

Kindergarten, first and second grades get together with the artist for an hour. A few parents volunteers are usually a welcome addition to the group. Students are provided with a prepared repurposed plastic canvas, scissors and glue sticks. They cut out colorful sections from their materials and put them together into flowers, mountain scenes, bugs, animals and just about anything their fertile imagination comes up with. 

Third, fourth and fifth graders meet with the artist for an hour and a half, and up to two hours. A few parents volunteers are a welcome addition to the group as well. Students are provided with a prepared repurposed plastic canvas, scissors, glue sticks, needle and thread. They cut out colorful sections from their materials and put them together into flowers, mountain scenes, bugs, animals and whatever nature scene they can imagine. Then, with the guidance of the artist and parent volunteers, they add some simple decorative stitches to their artwork.

Alternatively fourth and fifth graders could choose to make a collaborative class banner. It is a great opportunity to bring teamwork into the classroom. They can choose one main scene to put on their class banner together and then break up into groups. One group will work on making the banner, another group will work on preparing the sections of their scene and another group can concentrate on the embroidery stitches for the decorative elements on the banner.

At the conclusion of the projects, kids can take their work home with them. If the whole school or several grades participate in the project, an exhibition can take place to show off the work for everyone to see first.