The Language Arts Teacher and I collaborated to have the middle school students create scarecrows for the first annual Frenchtown Pumpkin Festival.
In groups, students depicted characters from the books they are were reading in Language Arts. For instance, 7th grade recently read My Side of the Mountain. They wrote character descriptions for "Sam" and "Frightful". From there, they drew sketches, planned construction and materials, then constructed their "scarecrows".
Materials were open ended, but they mostly used paper mache, paint, found objects, clothing, etc. All paper mache was coated with a thin coat of either polyurethane or spar varnish. They worked for about 40-80 minutes per day for one week.
We crossed our fingers and hoped they would withstand the weather for a week to make it till the festival. We had horrible fall weather for most of the week! Heavy wind and rain! At this point, they've been out for three weeks and are all mostly intact! Unfortunately, "Frightful" (below) has lost his wings. (Lasted fairly long, though, considering those wings are quite heavy. The wet paper could only hold up so long.)
We all had a ton of fun and the town really enjoyed having the sculptures around. I'm hoping this will become an annual tradition.
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