Art Day Disaster

My 6 year old daughter E had her last art class for the year. I usually go and volunteer for the session and was looking forward to being there with her. I also love helping her classmates out when they need some extra help.

I go pretty frequently to volunteer, so the kids know me by now. One of her classmates saw me right away when he got into the classroom and walked straight up to me. He said he liked me. It was a good way to start the session and a surprise to me. The session was going to be about The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The goal was to put some fuzzy balls onto a pipe cleaner to make the caterpillar and then glue the pipe cleaner with the caterpillar on a leaf. The leaf would be painted with watercolor, and it was going to be in a similar artistic theme as the book. It seemed like the capstone art project for the kids.

after the kids saw a finished version of the art project, it was time to start after we passed out the materials. Everything started out OK. The kids were busy, trying to glue the fuzzy balls onto the pipe cleaner. That’s when the disaster first started. The fuzzy balls did not stay on the pipe cleaner and it was really difficult to glue the other balls onto the pipe cleaner without touching the original ones. The kids had trouble all across the board and everything was a mess of glue.

I was busy trying to help each of the kids complete this first step and I was helping half the room, which was about 10 kids. I ended up switching the strategy where I put a huge line of glue on the pipe cleaner and started to hold down all of the fuzzy balls so that they stayed put. Once it looked like it was sticking, I asked each kid not to touch anything.

For some reason, the next step was to take a pre-drawn leaf and cut it out. Then the kids needed to take that leaf and use it as a stencil to cut out some paper that we were going to use for the watercolor painting. Some of the kids got confused to hear and ended up painting the original piece of paper. I had to help some of the kids figure out what to cut, what to draw, and what to use watercolor on.

Once that commotion calm down a little bit, it was time to glue the pipe cleaner with the caterpillar onto the watercolor leaf. It was so difficult to move the pipe cleaner with the caterpillar that a lot of the fuzzy balls started to pop off. Some of the googly eyes that were used for the head also started to fall off when the kids started to touch them. It was hard to move everything over and looking back, the kids should have just glued the pipe cleaner onto the watercolor leaf instead of needing to deal with the transfer.

Many of the kids were really frustrated about the situation, but luckily E was handling it really well. She is used to doing some crazy art projects and for it to not go well. She calmly asked for help from me and I was always happy to help her. One of the kids I helped was a few steps behind everyone and it was difficult to get him motivated to catch up. I had to really help him, and I was surprised when the teacher wanted me to stop talking for a bit even though the kid wasn’t anywhere near the step that other kids were at. We weren’t being loud either, but she asked us to shush regardless. It surprised me because common sense would be to let me help the kid catch up as long as things weren’t disruptive to other people.

At that point, I was a bit frustrated about the whole ordeal and how the steps to compete the art project really didn’t make sense for kids this age group. I took a few breaths and just refocused on finishing the project with each kid. Luckily, it all came together one way or another.

After picking E up from school, I asked her what she thought about the project. She said it was difficult. Then I asked her what could be improved and she gave a few ideas on how to make it easier for her classmates. I like the fact that I could prop her about things that she would change and that she could come up with some great solutions. I then added some of my own thoughts and she agreed with most of it.

I think it’s important to always look back on what happened to try and reflect on what you can improve. My hope is that if I continue to do that, my kids would be better and better problem solvers, and would also improve things if they saw an opportunity. That way, there is a silver lining to frustrating situations - including one for an art disaster. Here’s to better caterpillars on leafs in the future!