This was the last activity that we created in art.  I was unable to finish this activity due to the lack of on the spot creativity I had in first finding and image to create with the beans.  At first I wanted to create our British Columbia Flag, however once I had already drawn the outlines onto the poster board I realized that we didn’t have any beans that were blue (imagine that).  This lead me to let the beans create the picture.  When I doodle, I find myself drawn towards different shapes, symmetry and contrast.  I figured that once I started gluing down some of the lentils and beans in groups that some sort of guiding image would pop into my mind.  Unfortunately this did not happen.  Although I didn’t like this activity, I would use it in my classroom as I do believe that children would love to glue different coloured, shape and types of beans and lentils to paper, to create art.  I will however, keep the size of the poster board to a minimum as I found out very quickly that gluing lentils is very tedious work.  It led me to use bigger glue clumps and drop larger amounts of lentils into it at once.

I was surprised in how easily the beans were able to split into two halves.  Doing this made the gluing much easier.  As each bean has camber to it that makes the gluing surface very small.

When I use this in the classroom, I will have many different images available to spark creativity.  Just images may not satisfy some students, so encouraging students to think of geometric shapes and how they tessellate may be something to think about.   Having smaller poster board I hope will ease the pain of the gluing process.

As we were working on these mosaics I looked around the room and found a few classmates painting their poster board first and then gluing their beans down on top of the painting.  What a great idea.  This could be a simple blue sky under the mosaic of a bird flying for instance.

I look forward to using this activity in the future.