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First Grade's Art Show was a huge success! I have been so looking forward to sharing their work. We spent about six weeks on these projects (about twice as long a a typical project) and that hard work really paid off!
Our inspiration came from the lyrics of the song "America the Beautiful", which was featured in the musical students performed the same night as the Art Show. The theme of patriotism goes along well with first grade's current IB unit. Our paintings portrayed our country's "spacious skies", and "amber waves of grain", and "purple mountain majesties." I think these artworks are absolutely gorgeous! It's one of our most successful projects yet!
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Third graders have been learning about natural resources and how their availability affects societies. This is a very complicated concept for third-grade minds!
To help make the idea a little more concrete, we looked at the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy's art is made from items he finds in nature. He gains his inspiration from the materials that are around him. In the winter, he may decide to use icicles to make a sculpture, or he might make a design with colored leaves in the fall. He could use flower petals in spring, or river rocks in summertime. I wanted students to understand that the materials he chooses is dependent on their availability- just like societies are limited to using resources that are available to them. Students watched a short video about Goldsworthy's work and then we had a class discussion about his designs. The students were fascinated by the idea that his work was temporary- you couldn't "keep" it! This lead to a great discussion of WHY artists make art- it's not always about the end result, sometimes we make art just for the process of making it! Next students got to make their own nature designs! I put out baskets of natural supplies like leaves, bark, rocks, flower petals, and sticks, and encouraged them to explore the materials any way they wished. Many students chose to make radial designs. They could work in teams or individually, and used iPads to photograph their work. I had planned for this to be a one-week-only experience, but every single class requested to do this the next week, too! So we did! Second grade's next major project will be family portraits, which we'll start in a couple of weeks. To prepare, students have been practicing drawing faces! Each student had a dry-erase face template and I encouraged them to try LOTS of different kinds of faces.
Our focus for this activity was on drawing from observation- drawing how things really look, instead of how we think they look. Students had mirrors to observe their own faces, as well as sample drawings to learn from. The fourth grade science curriculum has recently focused on the properties of light and how shadows are formed. To accompany that learning, we went outside in search of interesting-shaped shadows to turn into artwork! First students used markers to trace the shadows, and then used the traced designs as the start of abstract paintings.
This super-fun project was inspired by kindergarten's current IB unit, which is about exploring what creativity is, how to be an original thinker, and what it means to be curious and to ask good questions. In the Art room, I want our kindergartners to "think outside the box". I talk to the kids all the time about how they can see the world with their "artist eyes" and that it's okay to have a completely different idea from someone else. To me, that's what it means to be creative! For this project, we were inspired by the contemporary artist Hanoch Piven. His art consists of collage-style portraits using anything and everything! Often, the "stuff" he uses to make someone's portrait gives clues about that person's personality or occupation. Here are some examples of Piven's work: Then our kindergartners got to experiment! We spent one whole class period making as many faces as possible with lots of different materials. It was fun to see how everyone used similar objects, but in unique ways! In the next class, students chose one of their designs to glue down to a background they had already made. Here are some of the completed designs! It has been so hard to wait to share this student work! This project has turned into one of my favorites. It's the first time we've tried this, and I already can't wait to do it with next year's third graders! I love when Art can mesh so well with other subjects, like it does through this project.
Third graders have been studying various landforms and bodies of water- islands, peninsulas, mountains, rivers, etc. To support that learning, as well as gain some color-mixing experience, students made paintings inspired by Google EarthView images. These photos are satellite images of the earth's surface, and they are just beautiful! Each student chose a photo and spent about 5 weeks turning it into a painting. I wanted each student to be able to identify the landforms found in their photo, and then to recreate the image as accurately as possible. We spent one whole class period just practicing mixing colors! I also wanted students to truly LOOK at their photo and replicate even the tiniest details and textures. And here are the finished products! They are such close matches that it's hard to tell which is the student painting and which is the photograph! The student work is the top photo, and the image from Google is at the bottom. Today I'm sharing a project my second graders have been working on for the last four weeks. The inspiration behind this project came from a book the students read with their classroom teachers, The Memory String. Students read the book, which is about a young girl who collects mementos of special parts of her life, and then they did some writing about their own memories. In Art, second graders created collages describing one of their memories. I wanted the students to think deeply about their chosen memory. I wanted them to remember every possible detail of that event, and then represent those details through the use of symbols. That's a lot of higher-level thinking for a second grader, but the kids did great! The students' first step was to make a list of everything they could remember about one memory. I told them to tell themselves the story in their heads, and write down as many descriptive words as possible. Next they were to choose 5-7 of the most important words and create a symbol to represent each word. They turned these symbols into small drawings that we would later cut out and collage onto a background. The next week, we talked about how memories involve emotions. Some memories are happy, while others might make you feel sad, scary, angry, or even confused. Our art-making experience was to paint a background for the collages that would portray the emotion of their chosen memory. Student had to make appropriate color choices for their backgrounds. For example, a sad memory might need blue or gray, while a happy memory would probably need brighter colors. An angry memory might need a red background, and a confusing memory might have lots of colors all mixed together! The students also needed to decide what kind of mark-making or brush strokes they needed to use to paint their backgrounds. For a sad memory, they might choose calm, slow, flat lines. A happy memory may need lines that bounce and skip all over the page. An angry memory might have harsh, bold strokes, and a confusing memory may have lots of marks swirling in every direction. The final step was to combine all the parts of the collage together. Here are some examples! A memory of playing outside with friends. A memory of moving to a new house. A memory of being in a car accident. A memory of a fun day at the water park.
I am SO proud of the work that these first grade artists accomplished this week. This was an inquiry-based activity we did to explore how colors work together. Each student chose a fall leaf photograph and spent time observing all the different shades and hues of colors they could see. For example- a red leaf wasn't just plain red; it could have spots of orangey-red, brownish-red, pinkish-red, light red, and blackish-red.
Students were given magnifying glasses to encourage them to look very closely, and to help get themselves in a scientific state of mind. If the weather had been cooperating, we would have gone outside to gather real leaves, but the photos worked great! Then, each student was given several basic colors of paint. Their task was to mix and blend colors to make an EXACT match for all the colors seen in their leaves. We discussed how the red paint straight from the bottle was probably not the right kind of red. The students were challenged to figure out what other colors to add to get just the right shade. What color of paint would make the color darker? Or lighter? Or duller? As a final step, students were asked to create a name for each of their colors. I have not yet taught much color theory to this group, so I am so very impressed with the close color matches they were able to make. We'll be revisiting color theory concepts later on in the year, but this was a great place to start! Fourth grade artists have recently completed these paintings of our solar system. The main art concept of this project was to understand how light affects the way objects look and then to practice shading a sphere. This concept connects very well to the students' current studies of our solar system. They are learning how the sun's light on the planets as they rotate causes day and night; similarly, light shining on a sphere causes shadows and highlights.
Be sure to notice the shading on these artworks- they turned out very impressive! The students will tell you that getting to splatter-paint the stars in the background was the best part! |
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