Roman Coins Lesson

I'm catching up with some older art projects. In my lower elementary class (1st-3rd) we made coins. I used Stephanie's plan here on her "Make it a wonderful life" blog. Hers are large and beautiful--mine are smaller and more poorly photographed. But in person they worked really well. I had lots of interesting coins. The basics:

 1. They each received a cardboard circle and a piece of paper. They traced the cardboard circle twice on the paper and designed their coin. They had to do a face on one side, like Roman coins (and most coins), but the other side could be anything. I had trees and cats and fire trucks and snakes and flowers and so forth.

 2. After designing, they colored the back of the paper with crayon to make a crayon transfer onto the cardboard (like making a carbon copy). They went over the original lines with a sharp pencil to transfer the image onto the cardboard. Yes, we could have just drawn onto the cardboard but I wanted to teach the skill as well--transfer can be useful later in life.

 3. Then I took them home and put glue on them. I used Aileen's craft glue.

 4. The next week, they smoothed foil over each side, using a thin layer of glue stick to hold the foil in place. They made sure to get the details from the glue.

5. They came over to me or to one of the other teachers and we put shoe polish on them. They counted to 60 (or maybe it was 120 I can't recall) and then we wiped it off together.

Like I said,these photos are not the most spectacular, nor are they all the coins we did. My favorite is the tree down towards the bottom of this set, but many of them worked quite well.