chilling at the pool.

The 3rd graders are identifying and creating movement in art this week. Like the kinders, they looked at the work of painter David Hockney for inspiration. We looked at a couple paintings from his LA pool paintings and identified that he created movement by using wavy lines and by using lines to create a splash.

We then drew out a pool shape together. After that, students were free to add any details they wanted to. Students colored everything except the water with color sticks. I reminded them about using light and dark to make things look more real like we did on their lego mini fig selfies from a few weeks ago. Many students added some realism by doing this on things in their drawings.

When it came to the water, students approached it with crayon resist. They pressed hard with white crayons to create the wavy motion lines and then painted the water and sky with cool color watercolors.

I started the week with a different composition in mind, but switched because I felt the overhead point of view was a bit too challenging for them.

 Hello Kitty makes everything better;)

 Yikes!

raining with david.

This week the kinders are learning to identify cool colors in art. I'm sharing a painting by British artist David Hockney with them.

When I share the painting with them, students identify the rain, puddles, and oval shapes. I then show them my example and we identify the 3 cool colors. We also notice that the lines in my example are white.

When we draw out the ovals I tell the kids to press as softly as they can with their pencils. We add more ovals to each puddle, identifying them as small, medium, and big. Then we switch over to our white crayons and trace the lines, but this time we press as hard as we can, so the crayon lines will resist the watercolor later. Broken white line patterns are added for raindrops as well.

I demonstrate the painting before passing out brushes to the classes. When they see the white lines appear as I pull my cool colors across the paper many of the kids get pretty stoked. It's art magic:)

Students are free to apply the colors wherever they want to their rain scene. Once they are done painting, they complete a sentence that tells the reader what they created in class. This is a little different than their previous sentences because they are writing the whole sentence for me and not tracing a frame and filling in a couple blanks. I put up a list of words used in the lesson that they can use. I also provide a sample sentence for them to see. I'm looking forward to seeing how their sentence reflections grow as we head into our 3rd marking period.