1st Grade: Jelly Fish Painting

This was a quick one day lesson to go along with a sea-themed music program.  I mixed up a bunch of colors of tempera paint, and watered it down a bit.  Students started by painting a half circle on their paper in one color, making sure it was pretty drippy.  Then they dipped their paintbrush back in the water and added more water to the bottom of their half circle.  After that they picked up their paper and did a little tapping (vertically) against the table to get the tentacles to drip down.  They did each jellyfish one at a time, picking a new color for each one.  Finally they did a little splatter painting.  This was fun- the kids really got excited when some of the tentacles ran together and changed colors. 

1st Grade: Kandinsky color mixing

My favorite thing about this project is that I only give students the 3 primary colors of paint, and they come up with all of these amazing other colors.  They love it, too. :)  I show them the basics of how to make the secondaries and we talk about how to get brown, but the rest they magically do on their own!  We first fold paper to get the 8 square grid.  They start with red, yellow, and blue somewhere in their painting (either a dot or circle), and then they have to color mix to fill in the rest, trying to make each box different.  This is 2-3 day lesson. Sometimes I read them "The Dot" to go along with the idea of how something simple can become something great, and I show them the famous painting by Kandinsky.

1st Grade: Geometric Robots

We have been busy making geometric shape robots out of all my leftover paper scraps from throughout the year! This project is simple, fun, and the kids love it. They can create their robot however they want as long as they are using geometric shapes. I use a hole puncher to create lots of little circles for eyes and buttons. We have a contest to see who can use the least amount of glue so it doesn't get too messy. That helps big time!!!!

1st Grade: Painted Paper for V-Day

There is something so amazing about giving little kids a big paintbrush and a bunch of paint and just letting them go to town!  What they come up with is so genuine, innovative, and just wonderful!  They jump right in...imagine giving a room full of adults the same things- they wouldn't know what to do, or where to begin! :)  For this day of painting I hand out palettes of red, pink, purple, black and white tempera, and had them choose paper from dark red, red, hot pink, light pink, purple, lavender, and magenta.  They do not get water to rinse off their brush as they work- they can just wipe it off on their placemat if it gets too messy.  I show them how to create tints and shades and teach them new names for colors, which they love (red + white= rose, red + black= maroon, purple + white = lavender, purple + black= plum, pink + white = bubblegum. and pink + black = raspberry)  We will be using this painted paper to make another project, but I'm almost tempted not to!

1st Grade: Penguins

This was a fun and cute idea I got from Mrs. Picasso's Art Room. Students picked out sky color (I had various shades of blues and purples, but most are drawn to turquoise- I think because they LOVE saying the name, ha!)  Then every students gets black and white paper, and step by step we draw and cut out the shapes for the body and belly, and they glue onto the background.  Next they cut out eyes, ear muffs, beaks, and flippers.  For the scarves, I had tons of leftover strips of paper from cutting paper down to size for other projects and they picked out one strip and glued it on.  They used black marker to add eyeballs and the ear muff band.  Finally, glitter. ;)

1st Grade: Jasper Johns Abstract Names

This was a great 2 day art lesson for my 1st graders.  We began by folding a 12x18" white paper 4 times and opening it up to get 16 rectangles.  I demonstrated how to use the letters of my name to fill up the entire space of each rectangle ( some got it!) They used oil pastels to create a bug chunky letter and then kept repeating the letters in their name until the last rectangle.  Then we used watercolors to fill in the rest of the white spaces.  Some of the messier ones are my favorites! :)

1st Grade: Veteran's Day Mixed Media

Meant to post these sooner! For this project, I showed some pictures from Eric Carle's Draw Me A Star. First day we painted paper and used the back of the brush to get some designs.  Second day we cut up our paper and collaged onto a big square white paper.  Then, we flipped the paper over and drew a star on the back (blank side), and cut it out. Finally we glued the star onto black paper, and used oil pastels to think of patriotic images, words, phrases, songs, etc.