First Grade Monsters

At this time of year, as much as I absolutely love my job, I am finding myself clenching my fists and swallowing screams due to the terrible effects that cabin fever and a very long winter can have on the average 6 year old.  Sometimes there is no other word, but "Monsters!"  Thus the inspiration for our latest first grade drawing and painting project.  Thanks to the captivating power of paint, my fist clenching has been greatly reduced, and the art room is full of an altogether different kind of monster.

We started by reading the book The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone by Timothy Ering.  One of my all time favorite books.  Frog Belly Rat Bone is a monster built out of junk by a boy who needs help protecting the precious treasure he discovered.  Students love the story and were instantly inspired to create their own monster.  We drew our monsters first and then outlined with sharpie marker.  Students were challenged to use "shapes not sticks" and to use their whole paper.

Next step, we painted with tempera paint emphasizing the need to still be able to see the original drawing.  The results are turning out quite splendidly.



The final steps are coming up soon.  Students will create a background around their monster or on a separate sheet to glue their monster into.  The final step will be a writing component to answer the questions-What is your monster's name?  What is your monster's job?  Many  have already named their monsters without any prompting...I love to see the writing component of art becoming a habit.

Clay, Paper Mache, and Paint: A Perfect Trio

Oh the excitement of creating three dimensional art with squishy, mushy stuff.  It doesn't get much better...  For most anyway.  I recently asked my first graders to design a character and then create a sculpture of that character out of paper mache.  Many of them LOVED paper mache.  Others, had to pep-talk their way through it..."I don't know how I'm getting through this, but I am!" was my favorite quote of the process.  Clay, on the other hand, is by and large the all time favorite.  I will definitely be ordering more clay every year so that we are doing multiple clay projects not just one or two.  Lastly, painting with tempera paint...I am always shocked at  the level of seriousness that my students approach painting.  As soon as they see a demo on how to paint carefully and how easy it is to turn a careful drawing into a colorful painting, they are immediately invested.  Granted, there are always a select few who are still more in tune with the sensory experience of painting and so need lots of reminders about not covering their drawing completely.  In those cases, I don't get too picky.  The sensory needs met by painting may are no less important than the creative and artistic skill gained.

On a practical note, though I am sneezing and sniffling a bit this week, I am thrilled to have discovered a great way to avoid the worst of the germs during flu season...plan messy projects!  I think I've washed my hands about 20 times a day since the beginning of February.  And students MUST wash their hands at least once during art which cuts down on germs in the room greatly.  From here on out, every year,  we will be up to our elbows in paint, clay, and paper mache between the months of December and April.

Winter Fun in the Art Room

 To celebrate the fact that our Wisconsin winter is finally underway with at least a little bit of snow, we are working on a whole array of winter projects.  In addition to having a little winter fun, students are also learning and experiencing the concept of THEME in art.  Students' work is structured around a variety of  stations set up throughout the room.  The projects stemmed from suggestions and a few examples I made, but it has been exciting to see other student-driven ideas develop as we work.  Another great aspect of this project is that students who can really focus in and work for an extended period of time on one idea are able to do this to until their heart is content.  Students who prefer to try many different materials and work with many ideas over the course of one or two art times, can do THIS until their heart is content.  It has turned out to be a very handy differentiation strategy.  

Angry Birds with Santa Hats

A "Winter Wonderland" sculpture, Gr. 2

Its Fall in the Art Room

The leaves have turned and started falling, its getting colder outside, but the art room is aglow with all things fall.  Sometimes I shy away from the typical seasonal projects, but this year I decided to embrace it.  I'm really glad I did, because students have been loving it.

First graders learned about Henri Matisse and created Vegetable/Harvest Collages.  An idea I borrowed from a fabulous art teacher's blog, Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists.

Second graders are working on Oil Pastel pumpkin drawings.  They learned about using overlapping and how to blend colors.  We also started to practice the concept of creating the illusion of 3-dimensions on our 2-dimensional papers.  I was really amazed at how beautiful these turned out.

Dots, Ish, and Magic

School is back in full swing and we are loving our art rooms!!











Here is what we've been up to in art class these first few weeks...

 
Kindergarten artists started their year in art by creating Magic Carpets, (photos coming soon!) an idea I borrowed from Hope at Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists, a blog I discovered over the summer that has many wonderful project ideas. We started out by focusing on drawing lines of all sorts on our papers. Next, students added cut paper shapes to their magic carpets for another layer of line, color, and shape.  The overall goals of this project were to start refining drawing skills and to practice cutting and gluing.  Additionally, this simple project allowed space in those kindergarten brains for yet another set of new  routines.  Those first few weeks of school are so exciting, but can also be really overwhelming. We will be moving on to a watercolor and crayon resist project next...also fairly magical.



First grade artists are just wrapping up projects centered on the book The Dot, by Peter H. Reynolds. We read the book, then students were asked to create their own dots just like the girl in the story.  The message of the story is that one should never be afraid to make their mark.  First graders had a blast making their mark...





Second grade artists also enjoyed a book by Peter H. Reynolds.  We read the story Ish and discussed what it means if something is "ish."  It's not quite one thing, and not quite another...it's "ish."  We applied this concept to our drawings.  Setting out to draw something can often be a challenge and a frustration if it doesn't turn out looking the way it should.  Well, the story Ish is meant to remind artists of all ages that thinking and drawing "ish-fully," is quite a wonderful thing.









Much more to come next week as we get started on our Art to Remember fundraiser projects.  To coincide with this project students at all levels will be thinking about and discussing the idea of giving and receiving gifts--an art in itself!  Stay tuned...

Technology (of a sort) in the Art Room

I recently made great strides in technology integration in my classroom...my first grade students spent three weeks of art classes using my extra special, super duper SHADOW MACHINE.... AKA an Overhead Projector!!  Yes, I know, it's overwhelmingly impressive.  As an art-on-a-cart teacher for this year, I have to be creative on how I meet that technology standard...

Joking aside, first graders recently learned about the solar system and the rotation of the earth in their science classes.  It turned out that this coincided perfectly with art lessons about Shadows.  We talked a bit about how artists make shadows using color and elongated shapes.  We looked at Wayne Thiebaud paintings.  After discussion we made the distinction that shadows in a painting or drawing are basically pretend.  Before we delve into how artists do that, we spent several weeks having a whole lot of fun making REAL shadows.  I was totally shocked at how well students did with this.  Each class took a different approach.  Not knowing how this would go over, I wanted to keep the lesson somewhat fluid to adapt to students' interests and the direction they wanted to take.  When all was said and done, the results were amazing.  My plain old overhead became a stage for many simple though exciting little tales made from paper cut outs that students presented in "Shadow Shows" at the end of the lesson.  One of my favorites depicted a student's own version of Chicken Little. His version involved an alien ship zooming in and stealing the sun.  Chicken Little stormed the ship, retrieved the sun, and put it back where it belongs.  Quite an amazing adventure.  Needless to say, there were also many monsters getting their heads torn off, etc.  As always, I saw the usually range of results.  Some students definitely got into the presentation part of this more than others, but as far as the process of translating a piece of paper into a paper cut out and finally into a shadow on a screen was rewarding to ALL students at ALL levels of ability.

Lights, Art Class, Action!

One of my first grade classes is especially curious, and their teacher is very good at drawing this out of them and following their inquiries.  Lately, I've been lucky enough to join them on some of these adventures.  In their classroom reading time, they noticed an illustration in a book that depicted two people walking through the forest at night with a flashlight.  They were very curious about how the artist created the illusion of the flashlight shining in the darkness.  When I came to their classroom for art that week, they bombarded me with excited questions--"How did they do this?  Can you show us?  Can we try it?"  As a teacher who is always happy to let my students plan lessons for me, this launched several weeks of exploration in art class   Each class approached the challenge in different ways.  (Teaching lessons in the same exact way for 8 sections of first grade gets a little boring.)  The one similarity was that we read the same book--"Black Out" by John Rocco.  The challenge was the same as well--create the illusion of light in darkness using warm/cold colors.  This concept was an extension from their previous project of Warm Inside/Cold Outside paintings.

 One class made small scale collages working with different kinds of papers and practicing layering to create depth.  They were each given a 6"x9" piece of paper for a background.  It was really nice to have them work small--I tend to let them always work big, but the change to a small scale project was refreshing.  They also had to really focus on the goals of the project--lights and layering. 

Two other classes were given more freedom to choose their own materials and subject matter. They met the goals of the project and they were also able to use previous knowledge about composition and materials used in prior lessons. 

Cold Outside--Warm & Cozy Inside

With my first grade classes we read several poems from the book Winter Eyes by Douglas Florian.  His poems are perfect for young readers and best of all, he illustrates each poem with really great paintings that are also very approachable for young artists.  Florian's images provided an excellent springboard for teaching my lively first graders about warm/cold colors and also the opportunity to teach them how to draw the interior of a room. 

We read a few poems and then zeroed in on two in particular.  One was about a cold "wintry, wondrous" night.  The other was about being cozy and warm inside.  We looked at the details of each painting and especially at the colors.  I demonstrated a few possible approaches to drawing either a Cold Outside picture or a Warm, Cozy Inside picture. 

Cold Outside

Cold Outside

Warm, Cozy Inside

Farms, Dots, and Finger Painting

It's been a very busy year so far! New job and wedding all in one month...very fun and exciting, but somewhat time consuming. I think life is finally returning to some semblance of calm, so I'm hoping to be better about blog updates.

Here are the projects K-2 students have been working on...

First and Second grade students read the story The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. They then created their own dots--just like Vashti, the main character in the story. They used oil pastel to practice drawing lines and then painted with watercolor over the oil pastel to create a wax resist painting. The finishing touch was to put their dots in "gold, swirly frames" just like the story. This was a great beginning-of-the year project. The story is especially great for opening a discussion about trying your best and having confidence in your abilities.


First and Second graders also learned about landscapes by studying paintings of farms by Midwest native, Grant Wood. Students were then asked to create their own unique farm landscapes. They were given the challenge of drawing a hilly landscape and then drawing crop lines on the hills to show the form of the hills. This project included a drawing component as well as watercolor wash and finally, tempera paint. The end goal was to still be able to see each step of the project.