1st Grade: Opportunities not Mistakes

My students are beginning to understand that they only get one piece of paper for their project, if they make a "mistake" the options are to flip the page, which you can only do once...try to erase (if erasable), OR try to make the mistake into something beautiful. How do you do this? With your imagination of course! Introducing the project to my first graders with the book Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg I showed how torn edges, rips, stains and other mishaps were turned into clever pictures. On the board I had quickly prepped blobs or strange lines that the class brainstormed together what they could be turned into. The catch was simple, they had to use Mixed Media to create their piece, and color in the entire composition. This was a nice way to slip in some art vocabulary and to see how students combined materials together. 
Below is the table I had filled with all sorts of "oops" students were able to choose from.