Second Grade Cityscape Reflections

 I love when a project or a technique makes my students gasp with surprise! This fun reflection project teaches some vocabulary along with a fun lesson in the magical world of washable markers. The second grade students first learned about the words cityscape and skyline. We looked at some art examples as well as some photographs of big cities. Then we created a skyline on our paper with permanent marker after folding it in half. We used colorful washable markers to color the buildings and windows, add signs, etc.

 Then we did the "magic!" We brushed plain water on the bottom half of our paper, and while it was still wet, folded the paper back in half. When we opened the paper, we discovered that the marker from the buildings had created a reflection in the water, just like the cityscapes near water that we had looked at earlier! We then brushed blue watercolor over the reflections to help them look like water, and as a final touch, colored the sky with crayons. Beautiful!

Elf Yourself at the North Pole!

Meet the newest elves in the North Pole: The second grade class! We started by drawing a picture of Santa's workshop and what we imagine the North Pole might look like. Then we used a digital picture of the students' heads, created new elf bodies, and then added these to our north pole scenes. Finally, some chalk was added to make a streak of northern lights across the night sky. Merry Christmas!!

Midnight at the Pumpkin Patch

I loved this lesson from Fine Lines so much, I wanted to try out a simpler version for my second graders. We used pencil and eraser to draw pumpkins, using the sizes to show distance in our picture. We colored them with oil pastel and used value to make them look three-dimensional and round. The pumpkins look like they are glowing in the moonlight!

Something's Fishy in the Art Room

Why no October entries?? Well, for the last few weeks, the elementary students have been hard at work making "fishy" art work to decorate the lobby of our auditorium. The middle school put on the play "Little Mermaid Jr." and asked us to help decorate. Each class made a different project, and all were hung on the walls, windows, and doors of the lobby and down the halls. It's amazing how much space 400 pieces of art can take up!

These beautiful fish rainbow fish were created by each kindergarten class. After reading about author Marcus Pfister's "Rainbow Fish" had to share his shiny scales to make friends, each student made a scale from a paper plate and covered it in shiny glitter. We attached all the scales together to make a huge rainbow fish for each class!

The first grade students read the book "I am the Best Artist in the Ocean" about a very confident giant squid. Each student made their own squid, complete with long tentacles, and wrote a quote about what they are best at.










Second graders used liquid watercolors and white crayons to make these amazing underwater jellyfish scenes. We were inspired by this project I discovered on pinterest.

In third grade, we have been talking about unity and variety. To make these coral reef pictures, we used opposites: big and small, near and far, high and low, in front and behind, etc. The water effect was done with plastic garbage bags and liquid watercolor.

These beautiful fish were made by 4th grade students who first used glue to design their fish, and then colored with analagous and complementary colored chalk.

Finally, the 5th grade used watercolors to complete these colorful fish.

The display was hung by parent volunteers. What a great show of teamwork to show off our schools' talented artists, musicians, and actors!

Roy G. Biv

Second grade students spent the last two weeks working on a rainbow project! I first saw a variation of this lesson on Pinterest. You can find the source here.

I love how bold the colors look when set off with black and white! We watched this video from They Might Be Giants on youtube and learned a little bit about the science of light and how the color spectrum is created. Then we painted a spectrum of color across our papers with tempera and painted some concentric circles using our leftover paint. The following class, we cut out the circles and attached them to our papers, and used white and black paint for accents. They are so bright and fun!