Creating Classroom Art

Our school just cut our elementary art elective, but we have a growing middle and high school art program.  I just stared teaching photography to my journalism students with some amazing results.  Craftivities, like the ones we did for Frankenstein, have always been a big hit with my high school kids.

So what is my point in all of this?

Art is good for students, and art enhances learning.

In addition the play-therapy of coloring has begun to take on new meaning in the adult world with the advent of adult coloring books.

The combination of art as a tool to engage students in learning and coloring as a stress-relief therapy for my seniors entering their last semester of high school led me to an interesting idea.

Class-sized coloring sheets.

This Disney's The Sword in the Stone coloring sheet I received as free reward through my Disney Rewards Club.  We just finished read T.H. White's book The Once and Future King as an intro to our Arthurian Legend Unit, so this sheet seemed perfect for my class while they watched the Disney movie as a reward for all finishing part I of the novel.

At first I was just going to print a copy of the page for every student.  However, when I opened to print it, I remembered that last year my coworker and I printed a Pinterest image of The Hulk on multiple sheets of paper to make it poster-sized.  So, I did it with this page and here is how:

1)Save your coloring sheet as a pdf if it isn't already

2) Open your pdf with Adobe

3) On the print menu change the settings

4) Select Poster Printing

5) Tile Scale: Set this to somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on how many pages you want the image on.  The dotted lines on the preview image show the borders of the pages that will print.

6) Set Overlap to between .25 and .5 to create a border to overlap the images when they are printed and assembled.

7) Click back and forth between Tile Scale and Set Overlap to display the pages printing on the preview.

8) Print

9) Have students color their portion of the image

10) Cut the white margin off on of each side and lay out on table or floor to piece the image together.

11) Tape together and display

I have received a complimentary game to review.

 The opinions here are 100% mine!  This post contains affiliate links.