"You have to be very careful, the glue gun is hot. Seriously, I'm not kidding!"

I didn't even know that there was such a thing as low temperature glue guns until I learned about them from E11 Playschool- a fellow Reggio-Inspired nursery school in Colorado. I ordered three from Hobby Lobby (they have them for $2.99, and they offer a 40% off coupon!). The glue guns do get hot, so there is still a need to be cautious, but no where near as hot as regular glue guns. 


To begin, we brought out our trusty journals and drew a picture of what we wanted to create. Then they searched through our "Beautiful Stuff" collection of loose parts to translate their ideas in another "language". Some children enjoyed just gluing random objects together. Most of the children chose to make robots.


Random gluing:

Making robots:

Here is a flower one child made, which she proudly showed off to her daddy:

Ms. Erin: Do you want to share any thoughts about your flower?
A: Thank you.
Ms.Erin: You are welcome.
:)

'Beautiful Stuff' Collage

We're blessed to have tons of 'beautiful stuff' thanks to parent donations. Our shelves were overflowing with  materials so I decided it was time to make a collage. I set out the jars of 'stuff', glue, and paint rollers. After we covered the foam board, my instructions to the children was to 'put things where they made sense.' Colors by colors or objects by similar objects. This is what they created:

I love working with these kinds of materials because it's like unearthing treasures every time.

Close up of the left side:

Center:

Right side:

If you look really close you can see treasures inside treasures-a marble in an egg:

-beads inside a measuring cup:

-beads inside a coffee creamer lid (you have to flip the top to see):

Some of their thoughts:

-Greens go with greens and reds go with reds.
-This isn't junk, it's awesome!
-Can I take this home? I'm trying to make a hat for my friend.
-This looks like the other thing we made, but it's prettier.

our 'beautiful stuff'ed envelopes

A few years ago our center collected items from home. They were sorted by color and displayed in the hallway until the university's education students dismantled them to display their educational projects. The beautiful jars of found objects lived in a box in the closet until I dragged them back out and set them out on the table, uncapped.

This year, a parent was generous enough to drop off a case of outdated software CDs that came in little envelopes with round windows. We used the CDs to create 'light catchers' and decided to use the envelopes to display some of the 'stuff'. The children had a blast going through the containers choosing their favorite items. I had a hard time convincing them to leave the envelopes here at school for me to display.

 

Since we don't have a lot of wall space due to a copious amount of windows, I've been trying to use our vertical space to display our work: 

The end!