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.

arts and crafts around the world.

A couple weeks ago we put on another one of our family art nights, Arts and Crafts Around the World. Teachers and support staff led 10 different activities for students and families that were inspired by the wide variety of cultures we have in our school community.

It was a lot of fun participating in as a teacher. It's always wonderful to see our students working with members of their families to create in a low stress setting.

Below are just a few photos from the evening:)

 I hosted Chinese shadow puppets in my room. I want to do more of this!

 textile patterns from all over the world

 Filipino 3d jeepneys

 

One of our 5th grade teachers and her quilting association shared their gorgeous works with our school community too:)

T is for texture.

The 1st graders and I are looking at texture during their current two week rotation with me. We have been identifying and describing different textures in the classroom and then altering the surface of printing plates to use texture to create art.

Last week I showed them the abstract skateboard designs of Portuguese designer Elna and this week I showed them some landscape collagraphs done by Ross Thompson. With the Elna inspired project we scratched the surface of styrofoam plates to change the texture of the surface. With the Thompson inspired collagraphs we added on cut and torn pieces of paper to change the surface quality of the base cardboard plate.

Both have been a lot of fun with the students. It's been cool to do both additive and subtractive processes with them. Once they make their print, students need to write a sentence about what they did. I supply a sentence frame and on topic words on my smart board for students to refer to. I emphasize that they should write about what they did and how they did it.