hello birdy.

I introduced the 1st graders to the work of American illustrator Charley Harper this week. This rotation's focus is on shape. Charley's work is great (for so many reasons) because he used different types of geometric shapes to create natural shapes in his art.

I introduced Charley and his work to the kids with the help of the official Harper website. We look at some of his images and I talk about the different shapes seen in them. Then we look at our focus image for the lesson.

I ask the students to quietly look at the image for a minute, although it's more like 30 seconds or so because they are dying to share. I ask them to think about things they see in the image- character, setting, shapes, colors, types of lines, etc. As students share, I write their responses on the white board right next to my smart board. With this, we are addressing one of their common core reading standards. Next week, I will have students do this again, and we will create a classroom sentence that describes the art we create with the vocabulary we used in the verbal art description.

side note- My goal this year is to align my lessons with the common core for each grade level, which I was overwhelmed with at first, but now that I'm doing it, I find it exciting and I'm looking forward to making my lessons even better:)

After this, I share the project that we will do and I ask students to tell me how it is different than Charley's original. It uses different colors and it is an autumn scene instead of winter.

I also introduced students to making and using a stencil to help create a repeated pattern in art. When we mad the stencil we addressed a 1st grade math standard- putting 2 shapes together to make a composite shape, and then make new shapes from the composite. We made a triangle and added a semi circle to the bottom to create a cone. This cone became our trees and bird in the art project. When we made the cone shape I had students put dots on the edges of their stencil paper so that their shape was as big as we needed it to be.

I modeled placing the stencil in the correct place on our brown paper and holding it still with one hand  while tracing it with the other. Once students did one, I showed them how to go across the circle piece of paper. We did a center row and then moved up above and then down below with our stencil.

We then added a color pattern to our trees, followed by line branch patterns. We made our bird by using the stencil on another piece of paper, and then traced it, cut it, and glued it in place. Details were added and the last step was to glue the brown circle onto a black square, so it looked like we were looking through a telescope.

birds and bones

This week I am sharing the work of one of my all time favorite illustrators with the 1st and 4th graders. We are looking at images that the great Charley Harper created. I love his sense of shape and composition. He had such a wonderful modernist take on the nature that he loved so much.

The 4th graders are focusing on identifying symmetry and understanding what proportion is in art and nature. We look at several of his images and talk about how he simplifies the animals and plants he is inspired by into more geometric shapes. We then look at how, in many of these images, symmetry is present. It could be in one element or it could be the entire composition.

We then look at the focus image for the lesson. It's called "The Wrenters". In this piece 2 wrens have made a human skull their home and filled it with nesting materials.

I have students identify what parts show symmetry and what parts throw the symmetry off. I then introduce the concept of proportion and how it is essentially how things fit together into a larger whole. Proper proportion is when the parts look they are a good fit or size for the whole thing. I demonstrate this on the board by doing a quick skull drawing and making the eye sockets way to big for the skull. I make them too small. I do the same thing with the nose hole. I ask them to be aware of this when they are making these same shapes on their own skull images.

The image that we are making is collage and drawing. I have the students fold a piece of paper for the skull, identifying the fold as the line of symmetry. We mark the folded paper on the right side edge at 3 points- 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4, so we can refer to them as we draw the skull shape. The skull shape gets drawn and cut. We then fold a black piece of paper and do some eye measuring for the nose and eye sockets. I ask the kids to make the nose shape about a 1/3 of the skull from cheekbone to head top and the eye sockets about half that size. Before gluing the shapes on, I ask students to place them on the skull to see if they're a good fit. If not, they can try again with their leftover paper.

We add lines to the skull to add detail and more symmetry with colorsticks. Then we cut out the bird shapes, add detail to them, and then add the branches and leaves to the image.

At the end of the activity, students fill out an exit slip to reinforce the visual art, math, and ELA content of the lesson. Students must identify what parts of their image show symmetry and they need to look for contrast between their image and Charley's image.

Note- I do not think of this as a holiday image. Some of my students believed so. Also, a few students thought it was a little disturbing. I told each class how a doctor had a skull from medical school and had left it in his backyard, and that birds made it their home. I got this from the story from the Charley Harper studio website description of the image. I explained that it may be a little disturbing to us, but to the birds, that skull represents nothing but shelter from the elements.

I did have a student that was really upset by the image and I had them work from another image that Charley did, while still being able to work with symmetry and proportion.

charley's snow birds

I shared the work of Charley Harper with my 2nd graders this week. It's always cool to expose kids to his work. He is one of my favorite artists of all time. I love his take on nature and how he often modified it with geometric shapes.

I showed the classes a few images that Charley made and we agreed that his art work was not realistic. Things looked a little different. We identified some of the geometric shapes that he used in his illustrations. Continuing with our focus on shapes, I walked the kids through the concept of symmetry in art and nature. We identified this in a couple of his images and body and hand poses that I modeled for them.

The piece that we focused on for our project was the one below. It's about as "holiday" as I get in my instruction. We also talked about how the wings looked like they were moving because he repeated the wing lines numerous times.

I chose to approach this project as a collage. The hard edges and flat colors of the cut paper mimic Charley's use of shape and color pretty effectively. Before the students started cutting and gluing, we discussed how out approach to this drawing was going to be a lot different than the oil pastel drawings from the week before. I pointed out that working with oil pastels is great for bold, intense colors, but it can be tough to work with because it can get messy quickly. Collage on the other hand, is a pretty clean way of working, but depending on the colors of paper you have on hand, the colors may not be as intense.

Symmetry was reinforced with almost every step. For most parts, the students folded the paper first and then drew half of the necessary shape. When they opened the cut pieces up, I reminded them that the fold became their line of symmetry.

When it came to the leaves, students could choose whether they wanted to show symmetry or not.

Great job 2nd graders! Thanks again Charley for providing timeless inspiration for another project.