O Christmas Tree...

Some of the first graders and Kindergartners created these fun Christmas trees this week for their last project before winter break. We drew a triangle at the bottom of the paper, and then continued to stack triangles up until the top of the tree. Then we added a star and a trunk. We traced these with black oil pastel, then colored with soft drawing chalk. They were messy, but fun. Each one turned out so different!

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!!

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!

Robots in Space!

First graders are learning about how we can use simple shapes to build complicated things, like robots! We looked at examples of robot "parts" and talked about how we could use shapes like rectangles, circles, semicircles, and squares to create robots with lots of moving parts!

Time for an art teacher confession: I rarely do the exact same project with every class. I have four sections of first grade. The first session used gray paper and shaded it their robots with chalk to add value, which I saw and loved in this lesson from deep space sparkle. I thought they looked great, but the kids were not impressed. They just thought it looked "dusty!" So for my next group, I switched to metallic silver paint. The shiny paint was more fun for the kids, but it didn't give the value I was hoping for. I think the best results were with the group that I had do both. We painted with metallic paint first, then added the chalk value when they were dry. Art is about experimenting and finding what works best!

After our robots were finished, we cut them out and put them on black paper. We used chalk dipped in water to create a space-themed background. The wet chalk technique was the highlight for the students!

Tar Beach

Tar Beach is a wonderful book written and illustrated by story quilt artist Faith Ringgold. In the story, Cassie Louise Lighfoot, a poor girl growing up in the city, dreams she can fly and that she owns everything she flies over. I read this book with my third grade classes, and then we created cityscapes of our own. First, the students created a skyline that they cut out of paper to use as a stencil. We used the stencils as a mask while using chalk to create glowing lights. The second class time, we used crayola color sticks (one of my favorite art supplies!) to create windows, streets, bridges, moons, etc. in our cities. The last step of our project was to write a short story about where the students would fly to if they could close their eyes and fly anywhere in the world. I love writing about art because it helps me learn so much about my students and what is really important to them!

     

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