Soft Paper Sculpture

I have been inspired by my fellow art teacherin pals to flip a few of my lessons. Flipping a lesson is recording yourself teaching the lesson and have the students learn from the recording. This allows me to pass out papers or clarify any questions along the way.  It allows students to see the lesson on the large screen and will be useful for students who were absent, and for sub plans.  Here is a link to Mini Matisse, where flipping lessons is being perfected (Thanks Nic!)  Here is my first attempt...

So there you have it, soft paper sculptures, I will post the results as students finish the sculptures!














....and thanks for reading, Dad.

Kindergarten Snow Families

My K's have been working with line, shape, and color so far this year. This lesson incorporates all three.  Students counted how many people in their family, and drew them as snowpeople.  We watched a video that explained about the artist George Seurat and pointillism. (Art with Mati and Dada) Students drew their families using circles for the bodies and qtips to paint the snowpeople bodies using pointillism dots.  Typically pointillism uses dots of many colors and the human eye naturally blends the colors, I feel that students understanding the process behind pointillism, will help them to understand the visual blending even with only 1 color. They painted the bodies of the snowpeople in one class, and added details with oil pastels in the next class. The results are an explosion of adorable.

This project was fun for students for many ways; trying new materials, painting with something other than a paint brush, and telling a story about their families.

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

Square 1 Art

Starting at a new school is great, the excitement about art is high and raising excitement is made easy for me, as we are starting a program called Square 1 art.  It allows students to create artwork that can be made into products for family and friends.  Each grade level creates an artwork that is similar in style, but with varying degrees of difficulty.  The artwork is sent to the company, scanned and printed into a sheet of stickers.  The stickers are sent back and the students get to keep them!  The sticker form contains an order number to get their work printed on everything from coffee mugs to ipad cases. Here are a few examples we are working with at Cedar Creek.

5th graders created a name grid.  A name grid is a visual way of describing a person.  They filled three boxes with visual representations of themselves and one box filled with their name written in a creative way.  Students learned that sometimes part of the border can be cut off on the printer so they made a creative border to fill that additional space.

 

First grade created a self portrait using some shapes for the face, adding color and line in the background.