colorful cacti- 3rd grade style:)

Like the kinders this week, my 3rd graders are also looking at the brightly colored work of Jennifer Willigrod for inspiration in their first color unit lesson. They are learning about warms and cools too.

We are starting the lesson by reviewing how they created tints and shades in their value unit. (cool side note- we heard back from all 3 of our focus artists about those projects:) Then we look at how Jennifer uses the contrast of warm and cool colors to get her subjects to stand out against the background. We talk about how Jennifer chooses plants that are from a warm, dry climate and how San Diego has a similar climate. Lastly, we talk about how Jennifer uses chalk pastels to create her richly colored desert plant drawings. Be prepared to get messy, kids!

We draw out the cacti together and then choose warms or cools to fill them in. The opposite set of colors is used in the background. To wrap up the exercise, students complete an exit slip that asks them how their drawing is similar to Jennifer's, why they chose the colors they did on their cacti, and what they think the most successful part of their drawing is.

 Committing to warm or cool cacti:)

Trying to hold the paper steady by touching empty spots and drawing without resting the drawing hand/arm on the table!

Reflecting and analyzing.

 Instead of using tints and shades to make their shapes look 3d as in previous lessons, students went from the darkest of their warm/cool colors, to medium, and then light.

kinder colorful cacti.

This week the kinders are moving into their color unit. I'm using a chalk pastel drawing by Arizona artist Jennifer Willigrod as the focus for this project. I shared that Jennifer lives in a hot,dry climate like we do in San Diego and that she often draws plants that live in that type of climate.

We started the lesson by reviewing light/dark and hard/soft by looking at an example of the Melissa Sweet frog habitat drawing they did the last time they were with me. I then introduced warm And cool colors to them and showed them where to find them in my classroom.

We then drew out our cactus with white chalk. I emphasized pressing softly, so that if they needed to make any changes they could easily rub it out with their super fancy eraser (their finger;).

Next, we added warms and cools to the drawings with chalk pastels like Jennifer does. The final step is to trace the white lines with a black oil pastel. This brings back the details of their line drawing.

The kinders are working with sequencing narratives in their writer's workshop time back in class, so I applied the same thing to our reflection activity at the end. I asked students to tell me what we did first, next/then, and last. I modeled writing the sentences and they tried it out too.