When life gives you lemons....trace circles!!

Last week, our history book had us knee deep in medieval China studying the invention of block printing. We had a grand craft planned where we would make our own prints out of blocks of hard foam carved with our own designs. We were all set - paint squirted and art shirts on. Everyone carved their design and was ready to print. IT WASN'T WORKING. (This may be due to the fact that I modified the instructions to fit the materials I had on hand instead of actually doing what the book said....maybe.) None of our prints turned out at all. Everyone was frustrated (as was I because this was supposed to take up the better part of our morning). We had to salvage things while we were all feeling artsy, so we grabbed some circle stencils and started tracing and overlapping. We got out the colored pencils and, with the one rule that each separate section had to be colored differently, began shading away. The kids LOVED it, and it occupied them for about an hour. It was great to see something so simple turn into really beautiful pieces of art. I guess we didn't learn much about the medieval Chinese that day, but we sure had fun and wound up with creations the kids were proud of!