Winter Evergreens

  Welcome back to school! After a nice winter break and an extra day off due to cold temperature, I am ready to get back in the school routine! We are easing back in with a fun and high-success project with the fifth graders, inspired by one of my many pinterest pins. We discussed value, the darkness or lightness of a color. We looked at how there can be many values of the same color. Blue is blue. But it is also navy, baby blue, sky blue, royal blue, etc. We can change the value by adding black or white to a color. Adding white creates a tint. Adding black creates a shade. We used tints and shades of a single color to create a quiet moon lit landscape. We used black to create a silhouette of evergreen trees, and finally stamped on some snow for a little drama. They all turned out so fantastic! I love projects that get "oohs and ahhs" from hard-to-impress fifth graders! They look stunning in our hallway, but I'll also be happy when the weather warms up and we can break out the spring projects.

Symmetrical Crayon "Batik"

The fourth grade students created these eye catching designs using regular wax crayons. The first step was to find all the lines of symmetry for their square and fold the paper along each line. They then drew a simple design in one of the eight "slices" of their square created by the folds. After the design was done, they folded it along ONE of the lines of symmetry, and rubbed the back of the paper with a hard object (we used the handle of our scissors) to transfer the wax to the facing slice of paper. We then repeated the tracing-folding-rubbing sequence until the whole square was full. The students chose 4-5 colors of crayons to color their design. Once finished, we crumpled up the paper to create cracks in the wax. They then brushed thin black paint over the design and wiped it clean with a damp paper towel. The result looks and even feels like fabric!

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!

Contour Line Shoes

 The first project of the year for 5th graders is complete! Our first class on this lesson was a practice in contour line drawing. We are so used to drawing from our imagination that it takes practice to get good at drawing what we actually see. The students drew several practice drawings of a seashell. They had to draw a blind contour-drawing without looking at their paper and a continuous line-drawing without picking up their pencil. These exercises make us better at using our eyes to help draw a picture. The following class, the students did a contour line drawing of their shoes. The drawings turned out so good, we decided to add some color. Today, they finished their shoes by choosing a color scheme. We added a background color that fit our scheme. They make a pretty impressive display in the hallway!