2nd Grade Neutral Colors

As part of the new 2nd grade art curriculum neutral colors are to be taught.  OH MY GOSH was I dreading it.  I'm the type of person that does not believe in wearing black or white...it's just not my color, a little too snoozey for me. I take that back-- I have 3 things that are associated with black or white only because I'm a San Antonio Spurs fan and when I was a small child I picked the NBA team with the worst colors in the league.  If you were to look at my closet, classroom, bedroom (anything that I'm in control of) your eyes might start to hurt because of all the color, and I'm no even mad about it.  Color is like my favorite thing.  It's awesome. It makes me happy.

But UGHH neutral colors really???!! How was I supposed to get 2nd graders excited about only using neutral colors If I wasn't even excited?  I searched the interwebs looking, no seeking, answers hoping one would just jump out at me from my computer.  Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.  As I was sitting in my classroom (about ready to pull my hair out) I got it--ICE CREAM. 

The best part of this lesson was talking about the neutral colors and how they make you feel.  One 2nd grade boy said they made him feel "depressed" (I'm right there with you bro.)  But then when I tell them GUESS WHAT, we're only doing a project with the neutral colors...you can see the anger in their eyes.  It all becomes right in the world when I show my example and they get excited to make ice cream!  

So I present to you our super scrumptious, awesome vanilla, chocolate, and twist ice cream cones only using the neutral colors (with a hint of red sparkly cherry, because what kind of person would I be if I didn't allow 2nd graders to add that dazzling detail?)  To make the awesome patterned background we used these, they are seriously the greatest.

Now that we've made you hungry go get yourself some ice cream.

Dinosaurs Love Underpants

Have you ever seen this book?

There are several of these books and when I saw this book at the bookstore I immediately sat done and read through it.  (Yes, in the children's section...I'm the type that doesn't look for a chair, the floor will do as I'm perusing the shelves). I had many laugh out loud moments while flipping through the pages, and I'm pretty sure the 7 year old boy next to me thought I had some serious problems.  But any who, this book gives us a different side on how the dinosaurs became extinct.  Ultimately, the dinosaurs kept stealing the cavemen's undies so there was a massive war that wiped those stealing dinos out.  Yeah totally silly, but awesome.  I just had to do a project about it and let me tell you talking about underpants with 1st graders was so funny, I'd suggest trying it if you haven't.  After they got over the fact that we were talking about underwear, we started in on this fun project.  

To start the project we painted massive amounts of beautiful painted paper,  this also gave us a wonderful opportunity to explore texture with out texture tools.

As the focus wasn't on the actual drawing of the dinosaur, I gave 1st graders the choice between a Triceratops and T-Rex stencil to use.  To make our underpants  1st graders used funkified colors and PATTERNS.