Here Come the Mummies

4th grade studied Egyptian mythology this year and we made mummies! 

You can find a video on the process here. 

We also made paper boxes with hieroglyphs for our sarcophagi. This was a fun project, will definitely do again! 

Autumn Leaves

4th grade did a fantastic job on these autumn leaves! We used chalk pastels and oil to blend, a technique I learn from the amazing Jennifer Alvarado. They could choose warm or cool colors, just to keep it nice and neat. Gorgeous!

Arcimboldo Portraits

As part of our Renaissance art unit, 4th grade viewed the works of Guiseppi Arcimboldo. We traced a profile of a head and spent the first week drawing fruit from life with colored pencils. 

The next week, we found images of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and plants in magazines to add around the face.

Meath Spirals

I really wanted to spread out from the same old "Cave Art" for my Prehistoric Art unit. I love cave art, but I didn't want every project to look the same. So I found amazing artworks and learned a lot in researching what other things were created in "Prehistoric Times". 

The Meath Spirals are stone carvings found in Meath County, Ireland from around 3200 BCE. They have a variety of designs so it was easy for my 4th graders to create some really unique works. 

We started by creating a glue and yarn collage of a spiral on cardboard. I gave them a handout of Celtic spirals for inspiration, but they could deviate on these as they pleased.

Then we wrapped the designs with copper tooling foil and burnished them until the designs came through. We stamped a square of paper with some Celtic knot stamps that I luckily had, and glued the metal to the background.

ALL of these were beautiful, no matter what the skill level or the amount of work we put into them with the time we had. They were really nervous about this because it is a lot of "hard" work, But in the end they were happy with their results. 

You can find the PPT I created for this here. 

I borrowed a lot of the technique here from a lesson I did with my Frist camp kids this past summer. You can see what they did here.

Pop Art Onomatopoeia

 

How many times can I spell that word wrong? A lot. Because that word is just a wrong word. Who decided it should be spelled that way.

The first projects at this interim position were based on "Word Art", which was great to help me learn names and because I did a similar unit the first week of school last year. So it was very easy to pick up and I already had a lot of resources for these projects. Just sharing a few of 4th & 5th grade's illustrated onomatopoeia drawings in the Pop Art style. They had to use primary colors and some kind of "bubble". (I'm letting that first "Boom" in even though it also used green, it was just so nice!) These were very original and well done. :)

Egypt

All classes just completed their Egyptian inspired projects. All projects were based on different artifacts found in Egyptian ruins and were embellished with shiny gold.They also used Hieroglyphs to write an Egyptian message on their artworks. There are many versions of Hieroglyphs, but I chose to teach them the one with the easiest images to draw.

Before we began, we played Pharaoh Bingo to learn which symbols stood for which letters. 

First grade created a Cartouche using patterns and gold with a message in the middle. You can find a printout and many helpful resources on this Egyking website.

Second grade learned amount Mummification and designed a sarcophagus with patterns and gold. The handout for the sarcophagus can be found at the Activity Village page to download.

Third grade chose between four designs of Canopic Jars.I drew my own jars and made copies based on this image:

 but you can download and print some jars from this Activity Village page.

Fourth grade practiced Zentangle designs on their Cat Mummies. I drew my own to copy, but I'll try scan and upload it.

Fifth grade practiced portraits to create a face inspired by either King Tut's burial mask or the bust of Queen Nefertiti. I had a few students who were unable to complete the project because they missed days, so they designed a pre-made face found here. 

Very proud of these, the kids really stepped up and did some amazing work. :)

View the Power Points:

1st Grade Cartouch

2nd Grade Sarchophagus

3rd Grade Canopic Jars

4th Grade Zentangle Mummies

5th Grade Pharaoh Portraits

Be warned: I gave them copies to decorate because I didn't think it was necessary to have them draw their own jars, sarcophagus, etc. for this project, and those are difficult shapes to draw. However, this caused my students to treat their projects like a "coloring sheet" and many didn't take their work seriously. In the future, I'll take my chances on their drawing abilities so that they take more pride in their work. Anyone else ever notice this happen to their students?

1st Art Projects: Names

first of all, for some reason, Rutherford county feels justified in blocking Blogger on our school computers, and the iPad app for Blogger is possibly the worst app I have ever used, so I haven't updated at all this year. Whenever I can get around a real computer and have time, you get updates!

So far, we have completed one project and are in the middle of a second. Our first projects were all based on our names. We created various artworks about letters so that I can learn their names easier (it has not worked in the least).

5th grade created zentangles using the first letter of their name.

4th grade used symmetry with their names to make a name design. At Campus School, we used our Chinese names for the design as an introduction to the Chinese art unit.

3rd grade got an introduction to one-point perspective with 3D names.

2nd grade created original alphabets to design their names. This was an especially frustrating lesson that I don't think I'll do again. :/

1st grade made crayon resist paintings based on Jasper Johns' letter paintings. These are beautiful and I will do them again. :)