Finished Early Symmetry

I'm Done!  Now What?

Every art teacher Every teacher has a handful of students at any given time tell them that they are done, there is nothing they can do to improve, and they totally understand what they did in their assignment/project/whatever.  In my classroom, I like to provide supplemental projects that students can complete if they finish early.  If it is only a few minutes early or we are going to be moving on soon, I let them check out my bookshelf or art materials just to experiment with; but if they are way ahead of everyone else in the class, I offer a follow up project. 

To follow up our Mandalas, I asked the students to make a radially symmetrical magazine collage.  I encouraged them to choose two or more pages from magazines based on color and to try to pick out pages with high contrast from one another.  They cut their pages up snowflake style (the ol' fold and cut method) and saved all of their pieces.  They then set about the task of collaging their favorite pieces together to create a colorful, radially symmetrical design.  I let them choose their background color and we glued them down (onto construction paper).