As part of my summer art courses I decided to have my students create a summer long collaborative artwork. We created our enchanted forest over 10 weeks, adding one new element each week. While I did this during the summer it could easily be adapted for the school year.
I started by creating 6 large brown craft paper trees that lined either side of our building's main hallway. I also made flower stems at different heights.
The first week students created brightly coloured flowers.
Most of the elements added to our enchanted forest were created using construction paper, such as the birds, fairy houses, and toadstools.
At different points throughout the summer I would also add elements that went with that week's addition, such as a couple of beehives for the kids' bees to swarm around, and spider webs for their spiders to hang from.
Another element that really made this forest enchanted was the addition of fairies. I invited other instructors and staff members to create a fairy that would magically appear in the forest each week. This was a great way to include everyone in the art making process, and turned a lot of kids into fairy hunters!
To finish the forest the kids added tinfoil dragonflies, 3D snails, tracing paper butterflies, and bugs resting on the leaves of the tree tops.
Stay tuned for future posts where I'll share detailed instructions on how to create all the different pieces in the enchanted forest.
My students created these colourful zebras using chalk pastels and charcoal. We started by drawing the zebras with pencil before going over our lines with willow bark charcoal. The kids the used chalk pastels in about 4 different colours blending the colours with their fingers ( a few kids wanted to make realistic looking zebras and so used white chalk pastel instead). I also had the kids use their fingers to smudge the chalk pastel out for their zebra's mane. 
