Early Finishers

In a middle school art class, I have students who have completed the project on day two, and students who won't finish until day seven. 

This leaves a lot of down time for students and after 13 years of teaching (currently my 7th in middle) I've finally devised a plan. Some options students always have are to play board games that I have purchased at goodwill over the years, or they can read, free-draw or just sit and talk with their friends. However,  I do have some more anti-social students who would rather do something on their own but are not creative, nor self-motivated enough to come up with something to do, so I have created the "Early Finisher" notebook. 

Inside the notebook, the lesson ideas are organized by medium:

These projects are images that I found on pinterest.com, that I thought students would be able to complete independently with little to no help from me. Thus far it has been largely successful. I write a little bit of info to help guide the students, but they understand that these are extra projects that are not graded. 

As far as material management goes, I find that students who have "free" time because they have completed their work, who actually want to do more art, will be respectful of the materials. 

I hope this will be useful to some of you :)