Mr Kantor's Classroom: geometric shapes

March is Youth Art Month!

Kara D - Elementary Flag Representative - Minnesota

Brent A - Kindergarten Robot Pastel Drawing

Tegan W - Metal Bug

Mason W - Flag Design

Lindsey T - Flag Design

Youth Art Month has been always been a crazy time of year for me; for the past 5 years, I have served as the Youth Art Month Representative from Minnesota. This means putting on a state wide art show featuring artwork from K-12 Students across Minnesota. This year's show featured over 120 student artists from more than 40 schools, it is a great opportunity for students to be recognized for their hard work and dedication to the arts (and the cookies aren't bad either)

Meanwhile, back at Cedar Creek...

We have been working on a ton of projects and here is the massive update I have been neglecting!

Kindergartners worked with shapes and color over the past year, most recently creating Shape Robots. Students studied the many shapes, both geometric (shapes with names like circle, square, etc) and organic or free form shapes (shapes without names, camouflage design, leaves, found in nature.) They created large robots using pencil and oil pastel. We also took a look at patterns and which colors look good together (Complimentary colors)

Here they are hard at work

Fouth Grade finished painting their bobble heads and I could not be more impressed with how fantastic these people, animals, and creatures turned out!

For more information on this project, check out my previous post here

http://mrkantor.blogspot.com/2015/02/clay-bobble-heads.html

And the Final products...

Angel

Grumpy Cat

Tree

Penguin

Princess

Alien

Fox

Business Clown

One of my favorite projects to do with weaving is this paper weave that first grade completed, students created and folded a paper weave using an AB or ABC pattern

More Info here: http://mrkantor.blogspot.com/2014/03/paper-weave-bedding.html

The paper weave serves as the bed spread for their project, they then designed and cut their own pillows

And designed their sleeping faces

Glued them down and added the paper weave as bedding

Some even had enough time to add a stuffed animal or additional blanket

We made STEM into STEAM by incorporating artistic principles into the design process in 5th Grade, as students have been designing Optical Illusions using a grid. We discussed the enfineering process and how engineers use their resources and each other to solve a problem. In this case, the students were shown the final example of what their optical illusion cube should look like, and one or two facts about the process from me, from there, the students had to use trial and error and use each-other for help to solve their task. This is a very tough project for some, and asking peers for help can be a hard process!

Using the Grid and a ruler, students created this cube with a smaller cube in the middle, they used at least 3 colors to make it appear to move back and forth in the space.

The background was made of geometric and organic shapes to create an irregular pattern.

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.