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. :)