Tissue paper flowers

I have seen tons of lessons that use tissue paper so I decided to have a go at it with my 2nd graders. After all, Eric Carle and all of his beautiful art work is hard to argue with. To be honest, this lesson was a learning experience for me as much as it was for my 2nd graders. Initially, I instructed them to simply begin tearing out shapes from tissue paper in the general shape of a flower and 'glue' the shapes down with liquid starch. This proved to be kind of confusing to many of my students, however. They had difficulty visualizing the shapes needed and many of them wound up pasting down squares of tissue in no particular shape.





I didn't want to give up, so the following week I drew some basic flowers up on the black board and told the students that they should draw their flowers first, making sure they fill their page. It was a whole new lesson! The students added the tissue paper like pros and came up with some beautiful flowers!




After the flowers dried, the students cut them out. They chose a color of construction paper and I gave them oil pastels to create patterns and decorations on their paper. They glued their flowers on the paper with elmers and Ta Da! Bright, beautiful, colorful flowers!