Turning Computer Images into Physical Art

Lindsay printed the students computer images created with the Virtual Bead Loom and I went to the store to buy pony beads and fusible beads for the second to last day with the students for the semester.  Today each student was told to find their design and choose to use either the pony beads or the fusible beads to try to recreate their design.  It was only Lindsay and I today, so Lindsay was leading the fusible bead table while I was leading the pony beads table.  I felt that I was well organized with all the supplies but I never imaged how hard it would be to teach ten children how to string pony beads together to create a design.  At first I tried to demonstrate it and some of them got it. Those students kept going while I tried to help the others.  The disconnect seemed to be that the didn't understand that they were recreating their designs from the bottom up and that they had to choose their beads that made up the bottom row of their piece.  Another disconnect seemed to be that the students who did not have rectangular designs to begin with did not understand that they should add colored beads to the areas around the design to fill it into a rectangular shape.  Looking back I think that I would either have the students only create rectangular designs or draw a rectangle around their current design so that they understand that beads need to be added around it to create the rectangular shape.  I had a lot of frustrated students who didn't know how to recreate their design and were getting bored, so I decided to have them make up a design and place all the beads the way that they wanted them in a rectangular shape on the table.  This turned out to successful and kept them busy for awhile so I could help the other students that started earlier and had some knots to untangle.   Once each student created their design on the table I told them to take the bottom row and put it on one side of the string and then thread the other string through the beads.  Then they continued to take from the bottom row of the design.  TIme ran out quickly and we had to cleanup.  I kept all of the unfinished designs for the students to work on next week and I picked up all the beads on the ground.  While I was picking up the beads one of the students from my group came over to show me a math worksheet that had a very high grade on it.  She was very excited and "I did well because I realized that it was like the bead loom and the points were just beads".