Two More

 On Tuesday, my friend Gay came over and helped me make some new picture boards for the church mosaic project.   As you might remember, we are making a Bible timeline in mosaic form to put up in the church building.  While exciting and grandiose in idea-form, this project has already been a learning experience for me in real life-form. There's nothing like handing young children pieces of plywood and 20 or so containers of small glass pieces to challenge any grandiose plans one might have.

However, we are making it through, and I must say that it's shaping up nicely.  I have several different groups of kids working on the project.  The sixth graders at church are trying to work through as much of the Bible as they can this year in their class.  Therefore, they've been the group to work on the more chronological pictures of the Old Testament.  They got these pictures to work on:

These pictures are actually almost finished - hopefully I will have pictures of them in the next few days.  As you remember, I had to do a little, um, corrective additive work on them to shape them up a little bit - largely from my failure to make the project a little easier for them at the outset.

The second group to work on the pictures are the third through fifth graders.  On Wednesday nights, this group is learning about various stories throughout the Bible, so I am working with them to do pictures of the stories they have had recently, and will have soon.  Last night they got these pictures:

Do you notice any differences between the first and second group of pictures?  Yes, the second batch is much simpler.  That's one of the first things I realized when the kids started working on them - I made them way, way too detailed.  I also discovered this week that Gay is wonderful at simplifying and drawing the pictures, so guess what?  That's her job from now on!

Not only that, but I also learned quite a bit after the first group of the best way to tell the kids to work on them (how to stay in the lines better, how to not put a huge square of glass right on top of a small circular shape, etc.), and these kids did wonderfully. Here is their progress so far:

I think one of the more gratifying parts of doing this so far has been seeing how some of the kids that you wouldn't expect to take to it thrive at it.   For example, I had two kids working on on Jacob's coat last night  that I had my doubts about when class began.  These are kids that usually have a really hard time sitting still and paying attention for long to any lesson.   In fact, it's hard to even keep them in their seats for too long.  However, last night there were meticulous in the their work, and did a wonderful job (see picture above).  The yellow stripe was done by the student who has the most problems with attention, and I think he did the best out of any student so far. It brought out a whole different side of them that I wouldn't have even seen without this project.

So, as I said, it's coming along nicely.