hip to be square.

The 5th graders are going retro this week. Some with a sculpture project and others with a collage project. 3 classes are creating space invader wood block sculptures that are inspired by the video game and the sculptures of Jason Torchinsky. The other 3 classes are creating abstract collages inspired by the geometric forms from minecraft and other 8-bit video games.

Both projects have been big hits.

A few things to think about...

1. Make sure, when starting a grade level sculpture project, that you have enough supplies. (I realized halfway through that I wouldn't have enough wood blocks, so hello minecraft;)

2. Expect a noisy class when the kids are working in teams on sculpture projects. I'm totally cool with it, but the classroom can get energized.

3. Have plenty of paper squares cut for a collage project that requires many 1" squares for 34 students per class.

4. On the same note, make sure your paper cutter is well oiled, so it won't be so darn irritating on your ears throughout the lesson.

 I love the planning to make the arms work:)

 Nice job keeping their classmates clean:)

styro snow.

Bit of a different week around here. Parent conferences are going on, so we are not meeting with classes like we normally do. I have 3 fifth grade classes this week for a shorter than usual time. I decided to do a low impact, read low mess, sculpture project.

I have used starch packing pnuts for projects before. Usually they are colored and go by the brand name Stik-its. For this project we used plain ol' packing pnuts.

At the beginning of the lesson we talked about symmetry in art and how it could occur in different directions in a shape or form. I drew a simple snowflake (vertical, horizontal, 2 diagonals) to model this on the whiteboard. I then told the classes that was what we would make today.

Huh? A snowflake? Cool. Um, okay... Were some of the student responses to this. I showed them how the pieces would stick together with a little water.

We all started out making the basic snowflake shape. After that I stressed that it was up to them to make their snowflake unique like snowflakes are. The could build up, out, across... I reminded them to focus on creating symmetry in whatever they made.

The students did a great job with the project. There was certainly a lot of variety in shape and form.

The fifth grade groups are the most social of my grades, and they did a fantastic job keeping things "chill" in the room as they built their pieces. I plan on selecting a number of them to display in the school office for the month of December.

Beauty, Clark:)

oh, peanuts.

I recently found out about Peter Opheim's work. Very cool stuff. His process is interesting. He creates small clay sculptures that very few people get to see, and then he makes large scale realistic paintings of these sculptures. The sculptures are pretty funky. Some resemble kids plush toys while others are more abstract play-doh looking things.

I was originally thinking that the 5th graders could make drawings like Peter does. However, they would not create a sculpture beforehand. Then I remembered the peanuts in my classroom.

Water soluble packing peanuts, to be more precise. I got a shipment of colored styrofoam peanuts at the beginning of the year. The commercial, crafty name for these are Stikits. The students could use these to create small scale sculptures first and then do an observational drawing of them. The stikits are great because it is a medium with very little mess. Just dampen the parts you want to stick together and press them together. The pieces can be cut, torn, or compressed into smaller pieces too.

Peter's work was very well received by the classes on Thursday. It had just enough silly in it, while having enough craft and skill present that the kids were hooked with the look and impressed with the skill.

We talked about how some of his creatures looked abstract, but he painted them in a way that was realistic. We identified his use of light and shadow to make the creatures so believable.

Students could make something that looked like an actual thing, or they could design a sculpture that was more abstract. I gave them about 25 minutes to build and 25 minutes to draw. Our drawings were not large in scale, they were more equivalent in size to the actual sculptures.

The classes had a blast building. There was a lot of variety in the types of things students made. When they drew their sculptures I emphasized that they should look either straight down at them or straight ahead at them, so the perspective of the shapes would not be so troublesome. They used colored pencils to add light and shadows to their drawings.

Well done 5th graders!

Note to teachers- it's kinda hard to have all the kids keep straight faces while you're up there talking about peanuts:)