Sharpie Shoes and Art Club

I have had an art club for about half the years that I have been teaching Middle School.  I enjoy it and recently, most of the students that join me are 6th graders, primarily because there aren't a lot of other after school activities for them to participate in and band students.  Band students, because of the nature of our schedule, don't get the opportunity to take art.  Band is a year long, every day of the week program and as it turns out, those kids are also some of the most creative, so I am glad to be able to offer them a visual art outlet and get to know them on a deeper level.

This year we did some fun activities that I have been wanting to try.  I had on and off about 10 dedicated students that came every week and a few more that came every now and then.  As happens, the last couple of weeks, I have been inundated with meetings and had to cancel art club for the week with is always met with boo hoos from both the students and myself.  I have one last project planned for my kiddos this year and I'll get to that in a minute.  Before I do, I want to share the latest project with you.

Because of the nature of art club, I can do things that I can't really do with my regular classes.  I can do bigger things on a bigger scale.  There are less of us.  Storage isn't as much of a problem and supplies aren't either.  I've been lucky to have had things donated, been able to purchase things with the small ($5.00) fee that I charged and have kids bring in items to use.  That was the case with the latest project.

If you look on the interwebs, you will see that 'Sharpie Shoes' are a thing.  A simple Google search yields millions of image results.  The first thing that we did to prepare ourselves and get inspired was to look at some of those images and sketch some of our favorites.  A couple of my cuties have their own pinterest account (be still my heart) and saved their favorites there.  Had I been using my head, which often doesn't happen until it's about a day late and a dollar short around here, I would have searched "sneaker templates", which I obviously did after the fact and come up with this. As a side note, fast finishers in my class are loving designing their own sneakers using print outs of these shoes.  It's been fun for them to do as they are finishing up projects and need to find something creative to do.

A few more of my students have to finish up their shoes but we will be starting a new project on Monday since we only have 4 more meetings until End-of-Year testing starts and I want to squeeze justonemoreproject in before we say our goodbyes for the summer.

Here's a few pics of our finished sharpie shoes:

Cage and his creation. I'm not sure of the theme here but he seemed happy with them!

Emma loved hers, put them on right away and has worn them several times.

Preston's design.

Hayden made these for his little sister.  I might have to have him make a pair for me since I am a fan of Hello Kitty!

I should have taken a picture of Alyssa's face when she finished.  She was so proud of her shoes!

When the rest of the kids finish theirs, I'll edit to add those pics.  I also need to take a picture of our band directors sharpie shoes that she created over Spring Break.  In a fit of jealousy a moment of creativity, Miss A designed an awesome pair of Minion Sneakers that she has worn to school a couple of times already. She is a big fan of the minions (who isn't, really?) and she has musical instrument playing minions all over her shoes.

Our next project is going to be a 3D paper mache' letter.  Shhhhhh!  Don't tell anyone but this is kind of what we are going to do. I love paper mache' but ohmygoshthemess and don't even talk to me about storage...