Thursday, October 25, 2012

goodbye art club

well, I had hoped that around this time I would have some amazing community art totem pole installations from art club to show...but all clubs were cancelled. so all the money and time we spent getting all of this stuff together was  a waste. it's so hard to tell the kids, they don't understand why, and honestly I don't either. but here we are. all sad-faced. :'(

bulletin boards

and for my displays in the school (until I recently went around and put up clothespins everywhere) I had one bulletin board. So I made a small gallery type display of our first projects, separating the sections with border. not nearly as impressive as last year's displays, but I guess I can't get that lucky again.

1st grade castles



this was one of our first projects: building castles from shapes. we started by looking at Paul Klee's The Castle and the Sun and built some castles with foam blocks. then we created our own collages. some of these kids got really creative and did some original things!

This lesson is available online, use what you want!

4th Grade Non-Objective


this is one of my lessons from last year, you can view project details here. it's weird to me that I taught the same lesson, the same way, same materials, same amount of time, but I only had a handful of nice works with this group. at the other school, almost all of them were gorgeous. these kids don't seem to be as motivated to do their best and that makes me sad. hopefully their attitudes will change as we learn how to work together.
 however, this last one is perfect! she really took her time and made some good decisions. wonderful work!

This lesson is available online, use what you want!

1st grade color wheels



we continued from our primary color lesson (still need pictures for that!) and mixed up some secondary colors this week. we started with a six pointed star and labeled the points (ROYGBP). then one by one we filled in the primary colors and mixed up our secondary colors. the kids had a lot of fun, and some of them are very pretty!


This lesson is available online, use what you want!

Friday, October 19, 2012

This week in art...

This week in art, we are starting pop art portraits in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. Usually, I don't like to have multiple grades doing the same project, but for this, I made an exception. Since we have to post curriculum maps and KUD posters and things for each lesson, I am trying to streamline things so that I don't have to change the whole classroom in the 5 minutes I have between classes. :/ Also, I am in charge of the yearbook this year and I want to do a comic book theme, so I wanted some neat pop art comic things to put in as decoration....but who knows if that will actually work out by the end of the year.
So we start by learning about Roy Lichtenstein, his life and works, focusing on his comic books. We looked at Drowning Girl and made guesses about what had happened to her. This lead to the "art tells stories" talk. We did a think-pair-share activity to answer some simple questions about facial proportions; here is the data sheet I created for them.
After that, we viewed a face with a grid overlay, seen below. I don't remember what website I got these from, but they are very helpful visuals for proportions.
If we had time, we started on a practice face. We are using a lot of math in this. We use rulers to find the center of the face to get our leadlines for the features. Here is the worksheet I made for that too. The circles at the bottom are to practice making skin tones with primary dots ( more on that later).
Second grade has started their aboriginal dot drawings. And of course, on the first day I do this very risky activity is the day I get evaluated. But I think they did a great job with it! ( thank you second grade).
We started by talking about Australia and put the flag and some general info in our sketchbooks. Then we looked at some aboriginal people and their art.i related them to our native Americans and that seemed to help them get who they are. After that, we talked about Dreamtime. I related it to how students may go to church and their beliefs. Then we did the very scary activity. I played sme aboriginal music ( which was very hard to find, had to buy some from itunes) and the students drew pictures in colored sand with their fingers. They were so calm and respectful, I loved it! After that's, we talked about Australian animals and traced some animals onto cardboard ( it's okay to trace here because drawing was not the focus of this project). And that's about as far as we got on this project in one day.
First grade made primary dots last week (pics to come) and this week we mixed up secondary colors on a paper plate color wheel. I think they turned out okay, but the kids definitely learned something.
and in other news, I couldn't find much Roy Lichtenstein stuff for my artist connection station, so I made my own RL pop art Barbies! They creep the kids out....but I like them. :)

CRQ No. 1

the kids have a writing assessment next week, and we finished up our first projects last week. So when kids started to finish early, i had them do one of our CRQs. this one was about Frida Khalo.
students were shown Diego and I and had a brief summary of her life. they had to interpret the symbols in the artwork and think about what they could mean pertaining to Frida's life.
some of these are excellent! but I made sure that they knew there are no wrong answers as long as you can defend it. and when they saw that the ones who tried got to go to the  treasure box, their motivation and enthusiasm were definitely increased.