About the artists: In the 2022/23 school year children collaborated on 3 art pieces throughout the year over the course of several weeks. These collaborations were displayed July 2023 in our local library along with children’s individual paintings and supporting documentation.

1 | Serendipitous Slime: Our school year starts with sensory invitations both inside and outside of the classroom. Children are exploring cornstarch and water, also known as oobleck in the outdoor classroom. Sand and natural materials are occupying the light table inside the classroom and in the studio we are color mixing with finger paint on plexiglass. It is during this process that a child takes a brush from the nearby easels. The brush had been sitting in a container of clear glue for collaging, unknowingly she begins to use it in the fingerpaint. As she uses the brush in the paint, the paint becomes even more sticky and gelatinous to the point that the child is able to manipulate the material with her fingers. As she becomes engrossed by the material she has created, it dawns on me that she has serendipitously made slime!

And so… it begins, for the first half of the school year we explore slime. We make lots of slime, we play with the slime, we measure it, we mold it, we flatten it, we dry it, we collage with it and we paint with it.

We paint with it from the ceiling no less! Using a funnel + pendulum hung from the ceiling, children make one gigantic painting over time. They take turns pushing, pulling, spinning and squeezing slime from the pendulum. They make lakes and snakes with the slime. They squeeze dots and notice air bubbles and how the colors change. Then one child decides to add paper dots that we have been using in our collages. Another child decides to cover all the dots up with slime. We work on our enormous slime painting until winter break.