Complement Color Cityscapes

If you're a regular visitor by now you already know or have probably guessed that I LOVE COLOR. Color is my jam.  I love teaching colors, I love to look a colors, and I love wearing colors!  (sidenote: you know that whole business about seasonal colors "what colors to wear during winter?"  Let's just say that neon, rainbow, and tie dye colors are acceptable all year round.)

Here's a very simple lesson loaded with content.  Here are some of the concepts 4th graders explored in our moonlit cityscapes. Value and how value affects form and creates the illusion of three dimension.  We touched on tints and shades and lastly using my friend, the color wheel, we reviewed complement colors.   As a final touch I had some puff paint where students could add some details.

Speaking of colors, I hope you're wearing your green today!  It just so happens that I'm Irish (shout out to my mom for being an O'Brien) and green is my favorite color.  Enjoy your St. Patrick's Day, I've got a birthday to celebrate later.

Heat Wave with 3rd Grade Chalk and Glue Turtles

Well the high here today is 95 degrees.  I'm sweating just thinking about it or maybe it's because the air conditioning at the school is broken and my classroom is currently 78 degrees and school hasn't started yet?  This will be a fun day.  Stay cool everybody, I probably won't be.  

Chalk and glue…yeah it's messy, but sometimes the effect can be pretty awesome.  After we finished our Wanted Self Portraits, most classes had an awkward amount of time left at the end of class.  So we did a quick drawing of a turtle and they went over with glue.  The next class we came back to our dried glue turtles and began to fill them in with chalk.  I showed them ways to blend the chalk together (making sure to rub gently and not smear it all together or you will just get brown).  I absolutely love talking about color, and probably more times than not I'm way too passionate about it and my students think I'm crazy.  Really, for every project I like to focus in on some concept of color.  So as we are wrapping up this school year I asked the students to dig deep in their brains to use what they know about color; what colors mix well together? which don't? what colors might look nice together, but not mix? Some students did a nice job of using some color techniques and blending the chalk together. Others probably just picked colors because they liked them, but regardless some of them are pretty cool.

If you notice some of the black lines look a little blacker and shinier?  Well yeah, end of the year supplies is dwindling down and I'm running out of glue!!  I have an obscene amount of mod podge, that I never use, so I refilled the glue bottles with it.  It actually worked really awesome.