moonlit nights and what some lazy guy wore to art class today.

For the 2nd graders' second project in their shape unit, we focused on identifying and using natural shapes in a drawing. We also took some time to talk about and identify positive and negative shapes in our work, too.

This project was pretty easy to execute and the results are pretty terrific. I found the project on pinterest. No info except for four student examples in a photo. The drawing took us about 40 minutes to do, which left 10 minutes for our exit slips and 10 minutes for choice centers at the end.

The moon shape was made by laying down a circle template and pushing out away from it with the side of our color sticks. I pointed out that the shape was NOT outlined, but showed up because of the difference in light and dark along that edge. This was their first experience with creating implied instead of contour lines.

We then drew out our tree trunks, trying to make them go from thick to thin to make the scene look more 3d. We filled them in with the wide side of the large chisel tip sharpie markers. We then added 10 big branches, then 3 smaller branches, and then one small branch to the drawing. We could also add a few animals (natural shapes) to the scene, as long as they were completely filled in to be consistent with the rest of the drawing.

Since the skull painting project went long last week, the first exit slip questions was to tell me which of these projects showed symmetry and how did they know that was the case. Their second question was to identify the types of shapes they used in their tree drawing.

One of the second graders made a moving monster over at the monster block center at the end of their class! Very cool:)

If you are active online, checking out projects by art ed bloggers around the country, you are probably familiar with the work of Cassie Stephens. She does some amazing work with her kiddos and she makes a whole lot of awesome outfits in her spare (ha!) time. Anywho, she does this "What the Art teacher Wore" series and I thought I might spend a minute here or there sharing what a lazy, yet somewhat creative and silly art teacher wears out here in San Diego. Starting things off is this fab ensemble;)

shorts- Old Navy, glasses- Nike, shirt- Target, gray hair- Mother Nature