Kindergarten Gets heARTsy

What would Valentine's Day be without a little lesson about Jim Dine?  Jim Dine: I know you're out there, here's my question for you--"Do you love or hate that you've become the iconic artist that most art teachers (elementary) love talking about right around February?"  Really though...I wonder.  I searched for Jim Dine on twitter, no such luck, but boy would I love to tweet him that question.  So if anybody knows how I can get in contact with him (like maybe he's your cousin or uncle or something),  let me know it'd be pretty rad. 

I did this lesson with kindergarten last year, so go to this post to see more of the "how to" details.  There was a slight change to the lesson.  Because of time constraints, instead of using toilet paper rolls to stamp hearts around the border students just drew their own with sharpie markers.  Although, I thought the stamping was pretty cool, I love the personalities of the hearts the students drew. When a heart all of sudden turns into a little person or magically develops a weird growth--I dig it.  

  

With all the Valentine's Parties underway in classrooms this is what the Art Teacher's Valentine looks like:

If only the colored pencils were always that sharp...

What are you doing for V-day?  I'm attending a super awesome Vintage Valentine event at the Joslyn Art Museum, you can call me Zelda Fitzgerald for the night.   

Keeping Summer School "Groovy"

One of my favorite things in this world is tie dye.  I thank the Art of Ed for this lesson.

I loved it. The students loved it. 

I had some students make over 5 designs discovering something new each time.  

I did require each student to make me one that I could keep so we could have a groovy hallway display when school is back in session.  

It'll be rad.

Here's some of my summer tie dye! 

5th Grade African Animals

Who's having the best year ever? I'd say 5th grade hands down.  This year every single project we did in 5th grade was AWESOME.  Now, I'm not saying all of the other projects I did with the other grades weren't, but overall in 5th grade everyone enjoyed the projects, learned a lot, and were extremely successful in both the process and final product.  

Here are links to the projects we did this year:

Kandinsky Abstract Painting

Lego Self Portrait

Abstract vs Realism Still Life

Minion Sculpture

Van Gogh Irises

And to end the year students finished with this African Animal project.  I think this now tops my list of favorite art projects to do/teach.

We spent quite a few classes on them 4-5.  It was a very independent project, but there were endless possibilities.  Students created a border and used a packet I put together to help with the patterns.  I then put together about a 20 page packet of different animals.  To narrow it down I picked animals you would find in Africa, but of course there were always a few exceptions.  I did require students to use an animal from the packet, but they had about 50 different one's to choose from.  Some of the images in the packet were step by step how to draw, some where just clip art, and some were just of animal heads.  Students could choose how they wanted to show the animal.  Using oil pastels student filled in the entire thing. On the portion where the animal was I required students to overlap with at least two oil pastels or more on every single part.

I love these.  I think they are so cool.  These are just a small sample of the drawings 5th graders made, but I had to share a lot because they are SO AWESOME.

2nd Grade Van Gogh Sunflowers

Have I mentioned that Spring is blooming in the hallways? It's pretty awesome between the classroom teachers and the artwork I've done with the students the HALLWAYS are filled.  It's so fun to walk down the hallway (in this particular school there are two forever long WHITE hallways) and see them filled with lots of color.  I also love overhearing students talking about other students artwork, it's fun to hear the Art Criticism they do on their own without even realizing it. 

Here's a lesson I did with 2nd graders.  I found the inspiration for this lesson here.  We started off the lesson by drawing the vase all together and dividing the table from the background.  I gave them different sizes of circles to trace 6 to be used as the center of the flower.  That was all the drawing we did.  I then handed out to each table a copy of Van Gogh's Sunflowers.  Students were to look at the painting to determine what colors to use with oil pastels. The focus here was seeing color. As you can see some students stayed true to the painting and others decided to do their own thing.  It is fun to see how everyone interprets the same image differently and you can clearly see that here.

4th Grade Owls

For those of you that don't know I travel between 3 different schools one school I have a classroom, the other two I have a cart and go room to room.  I see a lot of kids and not very often (only once every 8 schools days), it's a bummer because I have so many awesome things I want to do, but simply don't have the time.  At one of my schools I have a 4th grade teacher who will often ask me to come up with an art project that they can do in their classroom.  So when coming up with projects I like to come up with something that is very independent so the students can work on them when they finish an assignment early or have free time.

Here is the project I came up with.  

I explained the project briefly to the classroom teacher, I gave her a finished example, a step by step how to draw an owl, and an in progress example for the students to look at.  Here are some of the results.  Aren't they fun?  An independently done project finished with oil pastels.  They are also topped off with liquitex clear gloss varnish which kind of gives the oil pastels a beautiful painted look.  I like to use this rather than fixative if time allows.

This student comes from a Native American background.  In her culture, they see the owl as an omen so she chose to do another animal.