5th Grade: Pop Art Prints

For this project, I showed a powerpoint on Pop Art and Andy Warhol's famous prints.  We defined what popular culture was in his day and what it is now.  Students brainstormed a pop culture object that would best represent them and drew it on a sheet of small paper 4 1/2" x 6". Then they placed a styrofoam printing plate under their pencil drawing and traced over it again so it would carve into the foam.  Once their drawing was transferred and carved deep enough, they cut it out and we began to print.  I had them pick 4 analagous color papers, and  ink colors that were somewhat complimentary to their paper colors.  I set up a bunch of printing stations and let the students walk around the room to each station.  At each printing station I mixed two colors of ink together with a brayer (Red/Magenta, Blue/Turquoise, Yellow/Orange, etc.) to get a two-tone effect.  I always stress team effort with the print making process (each person at a station is responsible for a particular job), and they are pretty good about realizing that everyone needs to pitch in to print successfully.  Students had a lot of fun with this one!

(styrofoam printing objects)

3rd Grade: Owl Sketches

So excited to start our owl lesson after seeing the students beautiful sketches in their sketchbooks.  3rd and 4th graders just finished learning about owls and dissected owl pellets in science, so I thought it would be perfect to do an art lesson as well!  I will post the final artwork once they are complete, but in the meantime here are some of their sketches.  I spend one whole class talking about owls- different types, their features, and tons of visuals through a powerpoint presentation.  Then, I put a bunch of owl visuals on each table, and give the students the remaining time to draw four different sketches of an owl.  Some of these really amaze me.  You can definitely see the importance of engaging students by tying in another school subject (interdisciplinary teaching).  They were so into this!

2nd Grade: Re-Post Sunflowers with Painted Paper

Another lovely from last fall. Very Simple. Painted paper Eric Carle style collage.  Students spend one day painting paper, then second day cutting and gluing.  Yellow and orange tempera for the petals, black and brown for center, yellow and green for stem and leaves.

      

1st Grade: Re-Post Kandinsky Musical Lines

I did this project last fall, but wanted to post again because it was a great one!  Music is a huge deal at our school.  We are the only school in our district with an early instrumental music program.  Students travel to our school to learn violin. For the project, I let students listen to all different kinds of music (non-vocal, all different tempos).  They created lines and doodles with crayons to go along with the music and emotions they felt when hearing the music.  Then we listened to more music and used a paintbrush and watercolors to add more lines and splashes of color. Finally they colored instruments and glued them on. These were so full expression and  it was a good intro to paint, control, and paint clean-up processes.

3rd Grade: Warm/Cool Still Life

This lesson was thought up by one of the other art teachers I teach with.  She had collected various real dried flowers (Allium, Hydrangea, Eucalyptus, and Fountain Grass) and placed them in a vase.  We placed one vase in the middle of each of our four tables and had the students draw their still life in pencil first.  Then they sharpied over the lines, and finally used chalk pastels to add color.  They had to choose whether to use only warm or only cool colors.  Simple one day lesson!

4th Grade: Dreaming with Marc Chagall

For this project, I showed a powerpoint on Marc Chagall and talked about how he was inspired by his dreams to create his artwork.  Check out the book Dreamer from the Village by Michelle Markel. (Children's biography on Chagall).  First day we brainstormed dream ideas.  Questions asked were: 1)What are you dreams for the future? 2)What do you daydream about? and 3) What strange dreams have you had at night? This gets the students thinking. 

We used these figure drawing templates the first day to create a pose for ourself in our dream.  We drew figure and details in pencil then outlined in sharpie.  Next class I demonstrated color washing. I used watered down red, yellow, and blue tempera  and let the kids mix to get secondary colors.  Final day, I demonstrated how to blend color pencils with gradation technique, and let them finish coloring in.  The last step was to write a little description sentence about their dream on a cloud (that I pre-cut for them).  These turned out nice...fun way to do a self-portrait that's not your typical face and shoulders.  By the way, Marc Chagall's America Windows will be returning to the Art Institute of Chicago starting November 1st.  You may remember them from Ferris Beuller's Day Off! http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/Chagall