Grade Three

This grades activity is really exciting, but I am a little dissapointed in how it turned out. Since it was recently Easter, I decided to take on an Easter craft and make these wax resist eggs. Here’s the TikTok that inspired me:

To make the wax resist eggs, I used:

• Watercolour paper
• Watercolour paint
• White and black crayon
• Paintbrush
• Optional: a white or black pastel

All of the drawing in this project is done in crayon. Since the crayon is made of wax, the watercolour avoids is leaving white in the space it was drawn on. I started off by drawing the outline of the egg in black crayon and then added in some details with the white crayon. The white details are considered “invsible”, and should show up when the paint is on it!

Afterwards, I took my watercolour paints and drew stripes all over the surface. This helped expose the white lines!

Pros of the activity:

• Easy enough to do with very little clean-up. Crayons are easy for children to use and watercolour paints come out of tables with more water.
• Really cool to see the design appear out of no where!
• Allows students to learn shapes, colours, line, movement, etc.

Cons:

• I’m a little disappointed in my final piece. you can see the design, but it looks muted compared to the version in the video. Maybe my paints weren’t diluted enough so they topped the crayon.
• I used pastels instead of crayons. When the art was not turning out as I had hoped, I tried to use oil pastels and see if they worked. They worked better but I had used them with other colours in the past and you could see it in the white making them no longer invisible.

I don’t know whether I would use this project in my classroom. At the moment, I would say no. If I could not get the white vibrant enough, I doubt a child in grade three could. It it a fun idea and concept but until I can get it to work, I do not want to use it in my classroom.