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.

Starry Night over Nebraska

Time for one of my FAVORITE projects in the 4th grade! Starry Night (in Nebraska)! We start this project by looking at the original VanGogh starry night. Then we compare this starry night to two similar paintings: Burning with Cosmic Rhythm by T. F. Chen, and The Dark Starry Night by James Hance. Students discuss the similarities and differences of the three paintings. We talk about how artists use famous works like Starry Night to learn how to paint in different ways and because they are recognizable by a lot of people. We even watched a video by an artist who created starry night out of dominoes!

We talked about how the "composition" of all three is the same. They all have tall objects on the left side, a moon on the right, and a smaller object and a city in the center. They all have the swirl of color in the sky as well. But each is a picture of a different location. We talked about what objects might become part of a "Nebraska" composition. Good tall objects were trees, flag poles, windmills, silos, Chimney Rock, our city water tower, etc. Then we talked about what small landmark could take the place of the center. After we drew our pictures, we painted in an impressionist style so you could see our brush strokes like the style of Vincent VanGogh!

 Top: A student's backyard with a tree and tomato towers in the garden.

Bottom: A flagpole and our school building.

 

Top: Nebraska State Capital building and Memorial stadium (home of the Huskers!).

Bottom: A windmill and barn with a silo on a farm.

 

 

Top: Chimney Rock and a covered wagon on the prarie.

Bottom: City water tower and the school building.

Winter Trees

The third grade students made these fantastic trees this week using some new painting techniques. Starting with a brush they created the snowy horizon line. They then used a piece of flat cardboard to stamp and drag the white paint to create a trunk and branches for their trees. A thumb print in the tree makes an owl body, and the corner of the cardboard can be used for snowflakes. After cleaning up the paint and washing hands, the rest of the details, including the shadows and mood, were made with color sticks.