Kindergarten and Alma Thomas

Wow! My award for "Most Messy Classroom Followed by Most Impressive Clean-Up" goes to KINDERGARTEN!

It was like New Years Eve confetti in my room with all the torn paper we used for this project. The kindergartners started this project by looking at Alma Thomas's work and discussing the shapes and colors in her art. Then we drew white lines on black paper as a map for where our torn paper would go. We glued and tore up paper and glued, and tore and glued and those kindergartners tore it up! These turned out just perfect.

5th Grade Surrealism

We started this semester off with a project on Surrealism. Characteristics of surrealism include: dream like, unusual and strange pairings. This was one of the favorite examples of Surrealism:

The yolk of the egg is actually a sun, the white part of the egg is actually a lake. The artist used strange pairings and unusual qualities in this artwork. We accomplished the same thing in our Surrealist project. The 5th graders cut out images from magazines and paired them together in weird or unusual ways. Along with the visual piece, students wrote a statement explaining what their picture was about. Examples below!

4th Grade Chalk Pastel

We stared the project by looking at a few different types of landscapes. Using pencil first, we added a foreground, middle ground and background to our paper. We used black glue to trace the pencil lines. After the glue was dry, students used chalk pastel to color in their expressive landscapes. What a mess! It was worth the mess; this simple landscape project turned out just great!

Texture in 1st Grade

So lucky to work with such SWEET kids!

 During this 1st grade project, we combined texture and balance to create these lovely cupcakes. We began by using crayon and paper to do texture rubbings on the bottom of the cupcake. The kids went around my room and 'recorded' as many different textures as they could find. Then, we glued the cupcakes onto our paper, making sure they were balanced. We added tissue paper for some extra texture (and made sure that was balanced too!). Then, the final step was frosting! I mixed up glue and shaving cream and let the kids add it to the top of the cupcakes to make our frosting puffy, soft, fluffy, spongy, nice, squishy and fun!

3rd Grade Watercolor Resist

"What are those small round green things??"

Peas! Carrots, broccoli, radishes, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes and pumpkin too! 3rd grade has been working with watercolor resist in our latest project. Each student started out by drawing vegetables with pencil. We wanted to take up as much positive space as possible, so the vegetables were drawn close together. Students went over their pencil lines with sharpie then used crayon to color them in. After the adding a few layers of crayon, we went over the enitre picture with black watercolor. The thick layer of crayon showed up through the watercolor creating a nice contrast between the positive and negative space! Fabulous, 3rd graders!

2nd Grade Mixed Media

Are you Eating a Balanced Breakfast?

2nd Grade has been working diligently on their balanced breakfast plates for the past few weeks. We started the lesson talking about what a balanced artwork looks like. Are all of the objects on one side or are they mostly even on both sides? Then, we did a rough draft of our favorite breakfast foods. Pancakes that look like animals, pizza, strawberries and bacon on the side?? Yum! We used crayon and watercolor for our delicious plate of food and paper weaving for the background. Napkin, fork and spoon, hope you're hungry!


Here are a few examples below: