Winter Board

This display was put up quickly. I wanted to have something displayed for our parent night, but I didn't have any projects I hadn't given back. So here is a quickly done bulletin board. It's "snow" secret...Eakin students are artists!.  Favorite part? Adventure time penguins.

Aboriginal Art-2nd Grade

 This is the art part of that Dreamtime lesson we started a few weeks ago.We developed this lesson in college for one of our classes. When we did it then, we focused on pop culture as our subject. For this culture study in 2nd grade, we focused on the native animals of Australia. Students traced a cut-out of either a koala, a kangaroo, or a platypus (drawing wasn't the main thing here, so copying was okay). Then we used paint to build a black & white pattern around our animal. After that dried, we talked about complementary colors and added our dots. Some kids went dot-crazy, but others paid attention to what they were doing and made some wonderful paintings. The PPT for this lesson includes a video and some questions for after the lesson as well. The great thing about this lesson is that it lends itself to being naturally pretty. Even if a student messes up or completely misses the point, there is still something interesting to look at. (The 5th graders loved seeing these in the hall, it's so nice for them to be impressed by the little kids!)

Here are the resources I made for the lesson.

Lesson Plan

PowerPoint

Rubric

Koala Coloring Sheet

Video 1

Video 2

Valuescapes

In 1st grade, we are learning the elements & principles of art. For this lesson, we went from basic things like color, shape & line to something more abstract: value. Sometimes I forget that these kids were kindergartners 9 months ago,and I may expect too much from them. However, for those who can control themselves and follow simple directions, their work turned out great. Other students...had a colorful mess...

We talked about value and did a few guessing/data collecting exercises then started the project. It took about a class time and a half to finish these, so I want to find a book to supplement this at the end. Anyone have a good "value" book?

Here are the resources I made if you want to use them!

Lesson Plan

PowerPoint

Grading Checklist 

Online Lessons

I've started to add my lesson plans, PowerPoint Presentations, and Rubrics/Checklists to each post about student work. You can click on the Online Lessons link to the right to get a full list of posts with these links. I make up all of my own lessons (originally, but I always find that someone else has done the same thing online!) and I want to share. I always include Core Curriculum standards and Know, Understand, Do guides. Feel free to follow those links and take whatever you need. Let me know how they work out for you, and look for the Online Lessons logo (above) for more resources to come!

Secondary

moving from Primary colors to Secondary, last week 1st grade made some leaf collages (I need to stop making 1st do collages!).

We talked about symmetry and overlapping to go with secondary colors. The previous week, we made our color wheels, so we had already talked about how secondary colors are made.

putting it all together, I think we got some very nice leaf collages.

Here are the links to this lesson online, use what you need!
Lesson Plan
PowerPoint
Self-assessment Checklist

Primarily

Finally getting this post done! We made these about...a month ago? I am bad. In first grade, we are working our way through the elements and principles. Color is a big unit because there is so much to talk about (primary, secondary, complementary, warm & cool...)

For this project, we read The Dot  and talked about how colors are made. I introduced primary colors and how those are made from minerals, plants and, sometimes, bugs (kids loved that). This was right after our Klee's Castles collages, so I reminded them of how hard it was to cut out the circles for their suns. Then we practiced cutting 3 different circles and glued them together. Afterwards, they were all glued to a big white paper as a class display.

I love these! And if the 1st grade teachers don't want to keep them, I certainly will. :)

This lesson is available online, use what you want!

Lesson Plan

PowerPoint

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!

Lesson Plan

PowerPoint

Checklist

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!

PowerPoint

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!

Lesson Plan

PowerPoint

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.