Tint Shade artist statements

 

Third grade began a color study this year, we learned about secondary colors, intermediate colors, and most recently, tint and shade.  In my experience teaching tint and shade are complicated.  I like to relate the words tint and shade to something kids understand; shade is like shadow or a shade tree, a shadow is mostly black so shade = color + black.  Tint is color + white, so I tell them to think of it like the opposite of shade, one student also suggested we need tinted sunglasses when its bright outside, I thought that was a neat analogy and used that with some of my classes.

 

 3rd graders put a color in the middle and worked towards the outside of the paper by adding white to one side and black to the other, the closer they got to the sides, the lighter or darker it got.  We completed them like zebra stripes to make room for two colors.

 The blue and purple color made for a good sky.  We discussed silhouettes and how they look like shadows on a lighter background.  Students drew and traced their silhouette, making it easier to paint on the cool colored paper.

 Students knew they didnt have to get the paint to the corner of the paper since we would be cropping (cutting a boarder) and matting on construction paper.

 Students painted the silhouette and filled in some of the white space with additional blue paint.

 Cropped the paper and pasted it to a black construction sheet for matting and display.

 

 

 Now here is the hard part, students had to write about their work! I wrote a few vocabulary words on the board and the students had three or more sentences to describe their work.  It was very powerful to read the descriptions, its tough to talk about your own work sometimes and writing artist statements is a good starting point.

Shapes with scissors

We are working on Learning Targets with our school; using tools properly is something we felt was very important. Kindergarten is all about the basics, and when you are mixing secondary colors or drawing and cutting shapes, it's a constant struggle to make things interesting for kids. I continue to incorporate characters and books that students know and love.

The last two weeks have been the start to clay projects at Cedar Creek; and to start clay, I typically read a story related to the project.  This year, Kindergarten will be creating clay caterpillars, they will experiment with sculpting the clay and adding texture (Post coming soon.) We read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and created a colorful caterpillar by drawing and cutting circles. I even introduced the "magic trick" of cutting two and three shapes at once.

 Students draw and cut their own shapes, they add in details like a face and called it the very hungry kindergartner.  They added a background of a leaf and even draw colorful fruits and vegetables using shapes.

We also looked at organic shapes and used some organic shapes to create a penguin. Students draw and cut their own penguin and complete a penguins home in the background. 

4th Grade Landscapes

Working at a school where students have never had art before, has been a challenge, but also a fun journey.  It gives me a chance to use some lessons I typically teach with younger grades, and spin them to work with another grade. Landscape, for example, has turned out amazing.  4th graders at our school have been learning about landscape.  We have discussed foreground middle ground and background. We also talked about filling the page and how the sizes of things change in space.  Student requirements were to fill the foreground, middle ground, and background with an "ants eye view." Here are the results!

 

Texture

Second graders have been learning about texture in art.  Students learned the two kinds of texture; visual texture, and actual texture (tactile texture.) We practiced finding texture around the art room.

 the walls, erasers, shoes

 Step stool

We also read the book "Where the Wild Things Are," and learned about different kinds of visual texture and practiced making textures on a monster creation of our own. Each monster had to have geometric shaped eyes, organic shaped mouth, and an organic shaped body.

 After drawing monsters, textures and details; students outlined with sharpie, then painted with primary colors and even practiced mixing secondary colors with a new medium, watercolor

 Students cut their monsters and prepared to make an abstract background.  To learn about abstract art, we studied the artist Kandinsky and his use of organic and geometric shapes.

 Students cut organic shapes they had previously painted with secondary colors to use as the background for this monster.

 Here are a few of the in-progress examples