What Would Happen If...

Several weeks ago, while the Chris Martin painting project was up and running, there was a lot of waiting for turns for the painting tables. While children were waiting, we had our usual table of clay going and for several sessions, we had a table for just cutting. A very therapeutic and relaxing activity for busy 4 and 5-year olds. Snip, snip, snip. We have a large collection of empty apple sauce containers and the child were using these to collect "tickets" small slivers of paper they were cutting from recycled strips of paper.

As I watched the containers fill with shades of purple, red, and turquoise paper in layers, I asked out loud what would happen if they mixed glue and water with paper in the containers and left it to dry? Would it be like a cupcake? Like a sand castle?

Say no more. They grabbed the glue bottles and the water pitchers left over from snack and got to work mixing and measuring. Then we left the containers on the radiator cover to dry.

And forgot about them.

Today, we remembered.

Children popped the shaped papers out of the plastic containers and glued these to 3"x3" mat board scraps. Some of the shaped papers remained intact and others were carefully piled back up onto each other to create sculptures leaning into or away from some invisible wind.

The mat board squares and sculptures are mounted on construction paper, waiting for titles.