Friday, January 18, 2013

brrrr...

It's been pretty dang chilly this week... for San Diego;)

I thought it would be ,um, cool, to do a winter project with my first graders. I had pinned an anonymous icicle collage a couple of months ago and decided to use that as my inspiration.

The morning I started the project with my classes, I checked out one of my favorite art blogs, Colossal, and this was posted! I loved being able to share some of these images with the classes as an intro to what icicles are, what they look like.

Photo by Gary Jensen

We started by reviewing the color mixing we did on the candy corn still life drawings. I then talked about mixing violet. The plan was to make a purple sky background by mixing red and blue tempera paint. The kids LOVED doing this.




While the paintings dried, I introduced what icicles are and what kind of geometric forms they are- cones.  I then showed students a finished example of the project, talked about tearing the paper to make the shapes, and adding a shadow to make them look 3d and round.

Students tore the colored pieces into icicle shapes, attempted to keep them sorted by color on their tables, and added a blue shadow to one side of each piece.



I reminded the students about the texture clay texture project we did before winter break. I had the students wrinkle up at least one icicle, so they would have a contrast between bumpy and smooth textures. Some students decided to wrinkle all their pieces, some did a few, and a few did one.

Students then glued their paper icicles on to their purple paintings.







I think, for such a simple looking project, this actually packed a lot of content and skill practice punch.

3 comments:

  1. These are so cool! So many different things are being touched on in this lesson. Great textures and layering and different processes. Great job!

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  2. Hi D.,

    Thanks for another great post! The kiddos really got it and it shows in their artwork. Thanks for including the Colossal website, too. The time lapse video was so cool!

    :)Pat

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  3. We've got lots of icicles like these hanging from my home here in the Adirondacks in northeastern NY. Great project! Love all the concepts and love the results too.

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