stamp, stamp, stamp

There's nothing new or particularly innovative about using found objects dipped in paint to stamp designs on paper. The trick is in getting students to actually think about what they are doing rather than just stamping paint willy-nilly all over the paper. I'd like to think I'm successful in leading them toward more planning and less chaos, but that would be a lie. All I can do is gather up objects with different shapes, model the procedure, and let them have a go at it. The objects I used for stamping in this activity were cut up sponges, pieces of corrugated cardboard, several wine bottle corks, clothespins, and some assorted bottle and other tops, including several tops to glue sticks that I had saved when we trashed the used up glue sticks themselves.

My Kindergarten students did enjoy this, and some of them got very into it, to the extent that I had to be right there with a wet cloth to wipe hands before the table, their faces, and their neighbor's clothes were paint-spotted. Amazingly, the faucet in my art room doesn't work.... well, it works but it makes a huge grinding noise that sounds like the pipes are going to explode... so I have to be innovative in the hand-washing department. But I digress....

What I tried to do with the stamping activity was encourage students to create patterns. At three of each tables, there were different combinations of two primary colors, and students used white paper at first, but then I got the idea to have the paper be the third primary color (red & yellow paint on blue paper, etc.). Some students really did work on patterns of some type, others worked on stamping out shapes of actual objects (cars, boats, houses, etc.), but for the most part, students basically explored stamping with different objects without really worrying about trying to create some kind of identifiable design. And that's ok...... it just tells me that they need to do more of it, not less. :-)