Day 2: Figuring Things Out

Today Maren and I used our creative thinking to figure out how we would choose what sort of thing to do each day in Jump-Start With Art.

She already uses a couple of choosing devices for her schooling. She chooses a poem to read each day from a jar full of slips of paper, each with a poem's title, the book to find it in, and the page it's on.

She uses marked magnets on a magnetic board to choose which order to study her day's subjects.

We both thought something similar might work for us. We decided it needed to be something we could choose randomly, and, because we would be using them over and over, it needed to something more sturdy than paper.

But what?

We hit the junk drawers and closets to see what kind of inspiration we could find, and we found HOT GLUE!!



We both knew that hot glue "dries" clean and solid. It just might work to make some kind of coin.

We just happen to own a half dozen mini muffin tins that we've used for dozens of craft AND cooking projects over the years. If we could fill the bottoms of those tin compartments with hot glue, we could have a bunch of very neat little 'plastic' discs that we could write on. Oh, and we decided it would be a good idea to grease the tins. The grease would wash off easily enough after the glue had solidified.



However, the tins are made of aluminum, AND, because I'm an AMAZING homeschool mom, we turned this experiment into a science discussion. Aluminum is a FABULOUS conductor. We studied conductivity and other modes of energy transfer in science last year, so we were able to see how those principles apply in our daily life and how, sometimes, they can be a problem that needs to be solved.

Because aluminum is such a great conductor, it cools too quickly, and instead of having a nice smooth-bottomed disc when we squeezed the hotglue out of the glue gun, we had what looked like a flattened bunch of white worms.

What to do?

Well, how can we make the muffin trays hot? The oven, of course.



Luckily it's not July anymore, and it wasn't too oppressively hot to turn on the oven. We put the trays in and heated them up to 350 degrees and tried filling them again.

But, because aluminum is such an AMAZING conductor (have I stated that before?) the trays cooled too quickly. The first disc worked OK, but the rest were not much better than the first ones.

Next?

Violence!! We took out our scissors and CUT THOSE GLUE STICKS INTO LITTLE BITS!!! Then we put the bits in the muffin tin cups and baked them until the glue melted completely.



And because aluminum is such an AMAZING conductor, the trays and the glue cooled pretty quickly.

After that it was a simple matter of prying the discs out of the tins--we used a knife, but I imagine a toothpick would work--trimming the edges of the discs to make them look nice and marking them with a permanent marker, numbered 1 to 15 for the 15 areas of art study we intend to tackle.




Now, I hope no one out there is going to copy our idea. That's NOT the purpose of JSWA. YOU should come up with your own solution that utilizes junk YOU have around YOUR house, and better reflects the needs of YOUR homeschool.