MORE HYBRID CREATURES

Newly released information about the slugcheetah, gregiesna, shreins, and tarantula stingray.

SPRINGTIME AND WINTER LEFTOVERS

Some snaps of the Art Brainers working outside in the warm weather, alongside some hybrid creature plaster casts from the Winter session. Students used plastic animal figurines and playdough to make molds that we then filled with plaster to create these fossil-esque representations of their invented hybrid creatures. Mad scientist laughter was heard echoing through school hallways over the electric sizzle of our Hybrid Creature Creator Machine.

THEMES FOR SPRING 2014

image via

Our Spring 2014 session is underway! Project activities include but are not limited to:

- mini museums
- treasure boats
- telling stories inside forts
- detective work
- postcards from space, and...
- more!

CHRYSALIS TRANSFORMATIONS

Hopefully you are curled up in a nice warm cocoon at home on this (yet another, seriously??) snow day, and on that note, here are a few pictures from our "Chrysalis" project. We used sliding food trays, clay, and other materials to create cocoons that house miraculous metamorphoses: one creature goes in, and after a period, a totally transformed creature comes out! The only requirement was that students invent their own change (e.g. not a caterpillar and a butterfly). We saw sharks turning into donuts, elves turning into rabbits, ice cream cones turning into fish, and one transformation involving a "star-shaped virus with a five o'lock shadow" which I definitely did not see coming.

Elf --> Rabbit

Top: star-shaped virus with five o'clock shadow!

Pretzel --> Pretzel dog

Snail --> Cat

Dinosaur --> horned beetle

Pop!

Related: Radiolab's "Goo and You" segment of their recent "Black Box" episode. I'd always imagined caterpillars slowly changing inside of a cocoon, some parts somehow shrinking while others emerged, but nope! Turns out the caterpillar is totally dissolving into sticky goop before completely rematerializing from said goop. And still their (tiny, instinctive) memories are carried through this process. This information inspired a couple students' stories about the stages of their transformation, which involve the above shark-to-donut goo, and below, a snake dissolving into a sticky goop which "dries and scabs" in the sun (eww) before hatching two revenge-seeking monster snakes with teeth!: