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Our school is participating in a Global Artist Trading Card Swap! An Artist Trading Card, or "ATC", is a miniature work of art that can be traded and collected, kind of like baseball cards. This is our school's first year making and trading ATCs, but our kids are loving it and are excited about making it a Hendrix tradition. Our students have been making and trading cards with each other all year long, but now we have the opportunity to trade with artists outside the Hendrix community! Here's how the swap works: it's hosted by a school in Minnesota, and teachers all over the world send in their students' ATCs. The host school will send our cards to other schools, and send us other cards in return! Click here to see how last year's trade worked- it's a really neat process! One of the things I included in our packages of ATCs was a link to this blog post. I am hoping that the schools who receive our cards will find this page. If you are from one of those schools, I would love for you to leave a comment and tell us where you are in the world! Here are some selections from the two hundred Artist Trading Cards that we mailed. Each card is beautiful and unique, and the product of really hard work from our incredible Hendrix artists! Second grade students made these self-portraits as an extension of the self-portrait projects they recently finished. (See their previous drawings here and here.) For these ATCs, students first made the drawings in permanent marker, then added color with liquid watercolors in either warm or cool colors. These "Rainbow Squiggle Paintings" by second, third, and fourth graders are so pretty. Our students were SO careful and precise when painting them- and they really enjoyed the process! We started by using a tiny brush to paint a squiggly line in the middle of the card. Then, students continued to add lines in various colors, following the contour of the original line as closely as possible. Next are these marker print ATCs. In this post you can see the whole process of making the marker prints using styrofoam and water-based markers. My kids LOVED this process. I had several kids tell me they begged their moms to take them to the dollar store so they could buy styrofoam plates to do more at home. I love when a project is so engaging that my kids want to continue it when they leave the art room! My fourth grade Gifted Art group made this set of prints and embellished them using metallic markers. Fourth graders also made these cards featuring their Color Name Poems. This project was an extension of this painting and poetry project we worked on right before the holiday break in December. We cut their extra paintings down to ATC-size, and students collaged the best line from their poems on top. Both the colors and the poetry are absolutely gorgeous! This next set of ATCs represents the largest portion of our cards- I think 80 of our total 200 cards came from this project. I think these are some of our most beautiful contributions. Rather than creating the cards in the traditional ATC size, students instead made large paintings and then cut them into smaller pieces. Students made the paintings in response to music they were hearing. The focus was on expressive mark-making... for example, the student might have painted fast, zig-zag marks in response to energetic, bouncy music, while choosing slow, swirling, marks in response to a more calm style of music. I didn't have a chance to take pictures of this group of kids painting, but here is a similar project that my kindergartners did earlier in the year. It's one of my favorite lessons for any age student. The last set of cards I want to share are ones that students created independently, rather than as part of a whole-class project. They are of a variety of different media and subject matter. Students worked on these cards as an early-finisher project after their main art projects were completed. These are some of my favorites, as they really capture my students' unique personalities! Our cards needed to be packaged in sets of ten before being mailed. I tried to include as much variety in each set as possible! I wanted each school that received our cards to have some of each type of card, if possible. And here are our 200 cards, each wrapped with a paper telling about our school and our state, as well as including contact information to reach me and to access this blog. Hendrix is reaching out to the world! One last thing, and this is mostly for other art teachers who may be reading this after receiving our cards- I always love seeing how other art teachers have their classrooms set up, especially in other parts of the world. Here is a glimpse inside our classroom at Hendrix Elementary in South Carolina: I hope you'll have a minute to explore the rest of our blog, and I'd love if you could leave us a comment!
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This project is one that K5 students completed back before the winter break, but I'm just now getting around to sharing it. Their classroom lessons at the time involved understanding maps and how places are represented geographically, as well as learning about how communities function. In Art, we did a project inspired by the shape of South Carolina. I wanted students to be able to recognize our state's outline. I started the lesson by holding up a poster-board cut-out and asked students to identify the shape. I was surprised that not one single student got it on the first try, in any of our five classes! Their first answers were always a triangle or a heart. After I gave them a clue or two, eventually someone in each group was able to name it. Students started their artwork by tracing the shape onto colored paper. The next task was to tear and glue tiny pieces of paper to fill the inside of the shape. We learned the vocabulary word "collage". Students started by completing the outside edge first. The other main objective for this lesson, in addition to recognizing the state's shape, was for students to be able to accurately judge shape and size. I wanted them to choose appropriately-sized pieces to fill their space. I told them it was like they were creating their own puzzle pieces. . . they had to look at the space on the paper and tear a piece that would fit perfectly in each little spot. You can see that some kids were very careful to choose and place pieces with a lot of precision! The tearing of the paper also helps develop fine motor skills and build strength in their hands. One student noticed that the paper he tore was already in the shape of South Carolina- he was so proud to show me! It took two class sessions to get most of these finished, but by the end, students were very proud of their finished collages! In the week between the first day of the lesson and the second, I asked students to be watching for the shape of our state in our community- on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and billboards. Many students came back ready to share the places where they had recognized South Carolina's shape! As you might imagine, having this many tiny pieces of paper in our art room made for quite a mess. But kindergartners are great helpers, and with lots of little hands we were able to get the room back in order! It was a successful project, and one that our kids really seemed to enjoy!. |
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