1st grade Mondrian

The first graders learned about the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Mondrian used primary colors plus black and white to create abstract pieces of art with vertical and horizontal lines. We used pre-cut pieces of paper and glued them to make our vertical and horizontal lines. In the process, squares and rectangles were created. ours looked just like Mondrian's work!

4th grade winter cardinal paintings

This project was a new project for me this year. I found the idea from Pinterest (my new favorite obsession!) that originated from a website called deepspacesparkle.com This art teacher's blog is full of great projects that inspired me to try a bunch of new things this year.
We started out by looking at photographs of cardinals and then we used those pictures, along with a step-by-step drawing paper to help us draw a cardinal. The cardinal was drawn as the main focus of the work and then the branches were added later. I explained this as though you are looking through a camera at a cardinal sitting in a tree and you pushed the zoom button - this is what you would see. The student used tempera paint to paint the bird first. We talked about using a small brush and black paint to create the separation between the wing and the body. We focused a lot on technique and how to hold a paint brush and use a paint brush correctly. Back and forth - not scrubbing! Finally the students used white to show snow on the branches. I am so amazed with how these came out - one of our best projects!!!

1st grade Henri Matisse still life paintings

The first graders learned about the artist Henri Matisse. Matisse loved to paint still life paintings and most of his work included bright colors and bold patterns. After looking at several reproductions of his work, we got to work creating our still life Matisse pictures. The students worked step by step with me as I drew on the board. We used water color paper and pencil to start. We discussed overlapping and the use of pattern. The first graders outlined their drawing with a black Sharpie and then used watercolors to carefully paint their work. We learned that a small amount of water and paint will successfully fill a small part of our picture. If we wanted to fill a larger part, more water would make the paint spread more.
These paintings were outstanding, but were a challenge for some as controlling the amount of water/or paint can be tricky. I was really pleased with all of them and I love how these turn out.

The third graders made these beautiful tree reflection pictures. They folded water color paper in half and painted the bottom half to look like water. We used a water color technique called "wet-on-wet." This is where you get the paints wet and the paper wet, then touch the paint on to the paper. It creates a kind of "fireworks" effect and the paints spread out quickly. On the top half the students drew two trees, painted them brown and as they painted they periodically folded the paper in half to create a "reflection" or a print on the bottom half of the paper. We used small sponges and red, orange, yellow and green paint to blot the leaves on the trees. The paper was then folded in half again to create the reflection of the leaves.
The students did a writing assignment to re-tell what they did in this project step by step. This writing was used as an assessment for the over all project.

The fourth graders continued their study of Pablo Picasso by looking at portraits by this famous Spanish artists. We talked about how we see a face when we look at it from the side and how we see a face when we look at it from the front. We noticed that Picasso often combined both front and side view to create one face. This made for a really abstract piece of art.
The fourth grade made portraits like Picasso's by drawing a front view of a face and a side view of a face and then combining them to create one face. They colored them with marker using solid colors and then decorated the background with various patterns. These are always a lot of fun and they turned out great!

2nd grade wild things!

The second graders and I read the book "Where the Wild Things Are." We looked closely at the wild, made up creatures we saw in the book. We noticed how they looked like a combination of several animals put together. After reading the book and discussing the creatures, each student listed three animals. They then drew the head of their first animal with the body of the second animal and the feet of the third animal. They did several of these until they had a favorite new creature.
We then drew our new creature into a piece of flat styrofoam. We used a brayer and rolled ink over the styrofoam. By pressing the styrofoam on to the paper we were able to get a print of our creature that we drew. These came out awesome! We did three different colors, cut them out and glued them to black paper. We finished these by writing "Wild Thing" across the bottom.
The students learned the concept of basic printmaking techniques as well as balance and design when gluing and writing on the black paper.

1st grade robots

The first graders learned the difference between geometric shapes and free form shapes. We talked about how geometric shapes are shapes with names, like circle, square, oval, rectangle etc..A free form shape is a shape without a name - or a made up shape.
To help reinforce geometric shapes, I had the kids use different colored construction paper to cut out geometric shapes to make a robot. Their robot could only be constructed using geometric shapes. They had a blast putting together their robot as well as thinking about what kind of robot to make. They made buttons that said things like: make my room or clean my room. Ahhh, if we only had a robot to do all things WE do around the house....what would your robot do?