About 13,000 bottle caps, 34.5 tubes of glue, 96 square feet, 5 days...

Before

After sketching out the picture a couple of my high school students and I painted the 96 square feet mural.  

 After

We began on a Monday and in exactly 5 afternoons my K-5 elementary students were able to complete this Monet inspired mural recycling about 13,000 bottle caps.  We finished on Friday at exactly 3:00. 

Here's a close up of the bee.  A clean looking yellow bottle cap is hard to come by.  Most of them are blue or green on the inside.  The tops of the caps have writing on them which make them look dirty.  My students decided that the top of a Dr. Pepper bottle cap looked better than the green-blue inside.  So we glued each of them top side up.  

I wanted to have a light blue sky with a white cloud, but we just didn't have enough white caps with blue insides.  So I had a settle with a white sky and blue cloud.  

We used blue bottle caps with white insides for the bubbles.  Marker caps were used for the fins of the fish and flowers for the lily pads.  

Mrs. Retcher's kindergarten worked on the butterfly and they were so proud of it!!

How my week began...

My high school students have been working on ceramics projects this nine weeks.  So far, it has been a demanding four weeks.  I fired the kiln over the weekend and came back to school Monday to this.  My first thought was, "It's only one project."  Until I unveiled the bottom level and  found many more had exploded.  Not the best way to start the week!