Mother's Day 2016

I was looking for a simple yet unique gift for the students to make for Mother's Day. After creating a string art piece for our Ladies' Night Out fundraiser, I thought the students would like to create a string art on a smaller scale for their moms. My grade-level partner recently moved into a new house that has a barn on the property and in that barn...was a bunch of barn wood she was looking to get rid of. Lucky us!!!!! We cut the boards into 6 in x 6 in pieces and drilled holes to mark out where we would put the nails to make a heart shape. I was not brave this year and just pounded in the nails myself while watching one of our nightly shows. Before I started the project with students, I had lengths of yarn cut so that time would not be wasted and I could help students with their project rather than cut yarn. Before we started the string art, I had the students write a note to their moms on the back of the wood with a Sharpie marker. Some of them got really creative with a cute little poem and I am not talking about "Roses are red, violets are blue..." I personally tied the string to the first nail then had the students outline the heart with the yearn before filling in the middle. When they filled in the middle of the heart, they chose their own pattern. Some students chose to keep the yarn in a straight line pattern, some did a checker print, some strung the yarn so that it had the same ending point with every wrap they made, and some students just strung the yarn any which way they felt like. There is not a wrong way to do it, so that made this project desirable for young kids. I posted a pic of the finished project below. Overall, this was a very easy project to do with students and the moms LOVED it. The most time consuming part was marking and drilling the holes.