My third graders ended the school year learning a little about the symbolism of the sun in Mexican pottery. The sun has been used as a symbol of the life-giving energy and of good luck. Cassie Stephens has a very good Prezi here about Metepec, Mexico. To make these colorful, sunny pictures we started by tracing a circle shape for the face of the sun. Then we designed our faces with unique facial expressions, rays and other designs. We talked … Read more…
I am so proud of how well my first graders drew these beautiful birds and I’m excited to share them with you. We started by reading the beautiful book The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon. This book is a wonderful connection to science as Audubon was a fascinating man who studied the migration of birds and painted them. Your budding scientists will love this story. The students looked at reference photos of birds from books. … Read more…
Our Kindergarten teachers approached me with a request for an art project for the back cover of their memory books. The kids have filled out pages in their memory books all year and they wanted a colorful back cover. I found a fun and easy way to make fingerprint art on the Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails blog. Then, we used a great end of year poem by Helen H. Moore. We started by dripping water in pans of … Read more…
I was out for a couple days with a sub earlier this year (around Valentine’s Day) and I found this easy dot picture idea. Since it was around Valentine’s Day, I left in my plans that kids could make hearts for their design or if they wanted to draw a different design that was fine too. The steps are simple and easy, which is great for a substitute lesson. I usually don’t leave paint for sub lessons, but I figured … Read more…
This may have been my favorite unit we studied all year! We looked at the whimsical landscapes of contemporary artist Justin Vining. Here is one of his paintings: We watched videos of him talking about his influences, watched time lapses of his paintings and emailed him some questions about himself. He responded to our questions in this interview I posted previously. This was a perfect artist to study for us because Justin lives in Indiana in a rural area and … Read more…
Wow, I’ve been so busy. Aren’t we all though, right? But really, this is one of the most busy times of year. Parent-teacher conferences this week and March is when the yearbook needs to be finished up. I also put up an art show at the public library (which I will post about later) and we have been working like crazy on our mural in the hallway! The mural is almost done and I am just waiting until everything has … Read more…
My students are really interested in science and I always love when I can connect an art lesson to things they talk about in their science classes. This unit came about because on a day when I was absent last month, one of our Science teachers subbed for my classes (we have quite a few part-time teachers at our school and teachers will often fill in for each other when there are absences.) The students went to the Science room … Read more…
Did you Celebrate Oops!? My kindergarten and first graders started this open-ended project by reading the book Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg. We were inspired by the page in the book that said, “A smudge and a smear can make magic appear.” Each student received a piece of paper with a smear of paint on it. They were challenged to turn that piece of paper into a “beautiful oops” and create a wonderful work of art incorporating the smear. What … Read more…
Lines are an excellent starting point for lessons with Kindergarteners. To begin this line unit, we read the book Lines That Wiggle. The students used colored tape to make straight lines across their paper. We talked about horizontal, vertical, diagonal and ziz-zag lines. During the next class period, the students used tempera cakes to paint a variety of lines: wavy, loopy, dotted, dashed, squiggly, spiral, jagged and more. Aren’t these lovely and expressive? After the painting project, we moved … Read more…
Painting on cloth gives such nice, soft colors and is a challenging change from painting on paper. We tied our lesson into African Korhogo cloth painting and you can read about this project in previous posts here. We used unbleached muslin cloth and regular watercolor paints (Crayola or Prang.) The kids drew their design on paper first, then put the paper under the muslin. You can see the lines through the cloth. Then, they traced the design onto the muslin … Read more…
Remember these samples I got from the Pacon company? Several of you were curious about the multi-media art paper, so I decided to test it out. I primarily use watercolor and collage in my personal art and I am always looking for good paper to use. I first tested this out by painting shapes and patterns with watercolor. I do tend to use quite a bit of water when blending colors. Here are the results. Here are the pictures (without … Read more…
Playing with pattern is a simple way to create collage elements when you have hit a creative block. Create patterns using watercolor paints. After the pages dry, tear or cut up into shapes to use as elements for your collages and art journal pages.
The Pacon company sent me some free supplies to try out. These are what I received. Since it is the summer and I’m not teaching any classes, I decided to do a project with my daughter who is 4 years old. We rolled out the fingerpaint paper and poured some Crayola fingerpaints . She wanted to paint her pony with the paints. I let her, because we have so many of those darn things from garage sales. She knew to … Read more…
Beautiful spring butterflies are a great way to end the school year. Paint dotters give colorful results without a ton of mess. Kindergartners drew these with pencil first. I read a suggestion from Patty Palmer on the art teacher Facebook group to use tracers for the top set of the wings to get the size proportional and then have the kids draw the bottom of the wings on their own. Then they used paint dotters to create symmetrical designs on … Read more…
