Church Year Chain

For art today we built our annual church year chain.  It's a chain that marks the colors of the altar paraments at church (handy since my class is in charge of setting up the altar when we have chapel at church).

The 6th graders were super excited all day.  Last night I wrote the number of strips per color we needed to cut and then wrote the order we needed to put them in, so they've been staring at them all day.  There was a brief argument over who got to cut the strips; it's a big deal because they get to use the huge paper cutter from the office.  I solved it by saying the 6th graders get first chance since they won't get to do it next year.  Then the ones who got to cut strips last year were put out of the running, leaving us with two sixth graders to cut the strips.  They did a good job taking turns.

The hardest part about this project is finding enough jobs to keep everyone busy.  Someone collected staplers from other classrooms, someone else got colored paper from the office, still others kept track of the order the colors needed to be in, and then there were the staplers who created the physical chain.  We didn't finish in record time this year (too many strong personalities for that), but we finished in time to have recess before the end of the day.

I actually remembered to take pictures of the process! Last year I had to covertly take pictures when no one was looking since they didn't like having their picture taken and would hide from the camera.  I started out doing that again, but when they noticed the camera out, all of them posed for pictures!  Even the boys!  And some who were so camera shy last year actually asked me to take a picture of them working on their job!  It was crazy and it took some getting used to.  It all comes down to these fifth graders; they love having their picture taken, so it rubs off on the sixth graders too.