Second Grade Bug Jars

Right now the playground is full of grasshoppers, bees, lady bugs and other creepy crawlies, as well as little children trying to catch them!  We even have some kind of 6 legged critter flying around our class room.  After reading several books about insects and icky bugs, we drew our own in jars.  I have a "How to Draw Insects" book to get the students going.  Some artists even made little houses inside the jars for their pet bugs!

First Grade End of Year Flip Flops

I don't know who to credit with this project. I have read the two books for years and made flip flops with First graders at the end of the year.  It is a good way to review lines, shapes, patterns, color, and symmetry. They make us look forward to cool summer feet!

Third grade end of year Skateboards

Third graders love "cool" art priojects. This year we are designing skateboards. I allowed a lot of leeway in this project so that they will make some personal artistic choices. They could draw the top of the board, with or without wheels or the underside showing the trucks and wheels. They could draw any symbols or designs, except trite skulls and gory images. They could use any medium or combination of materials to color their board. As you will see from these early results, they used paint, colored pencil, markers, pastels, and had fun personalizing their boards.

Second Grade end of year Sun Glasses

I am not sure where this project originated, or if I made it up myself, but I have used it for years in Second Grade in May.  I  take several weeks to read "Orlando's Little While Friends" by Audry Wood. It is a wonderful story of a little boy who goes on summer vacation in his van with his parents and learns to be less shy and make friends where ever he goes, even if only for a little while. The kids absolutely LOVE this book. Next we make  huge art sunglasses. The students learn to draw a frame measuring  2 fingers to make it wide enough to  draw patterns of shapes and lines inside. They go over it with sharpie and use crayons to also add pattern with color.  Then we discuss where we may be going this summer or wish we were going, and draw a landscape scene inside the lenses. It is a challenge at first to stick to the same location, but draw different landmarks in each lens. These too are colored brightly with crayon, then cut out. They have garnered much hovering and discussion around the bulletin board where they hang in the hallway!

Kinder Texture Fish

I have to admit I use a lot of  project ideas from Deep Space Sparkle. I enjoy Patty Palmer's use of paint and simple shapes for young artists. This project began with the books  'Swimmy" and "Big Al".Both stories talk about friendship and problem solving in social situations.
We then painted fish by mixing 2 primary colors. These were then cut out and collaged with shapes that the children cut from colored paper, and wrapped with yarn.  We talked about how texture is added to art to make it interesting and fun to touch! Texture is one of the art elements that artists use. The background was printed with a variety of lids dipped into white tempera paint, to look like bubbles. Due to the fluffiness of the yarn, I hot glued the fish onto their backgrounds outside of class. They are pretty darn cute!

First Grade Apples

This is a Deep Space Sparkle project that I used for the first time this year.We made these apples in the spring, with the emphasis on the work that the apple trees are doing now to produce apples in the fall. Unless a child sees an apple tree first hand, the concept is lost on them, because apples can be obtained from the grocery store nearly all year long. We first read about apples, then traced 2 big apple shapes onto white paper. We mixed primary colors to create 2 shades of apples, one slightly orangish. Blue and yellow mixed produced a green for stems and leaves. A colored mat was decorated with markers, and a fringe cut on each end. The final step involved drawing a white pastel "moon crescent" on our apples to make them look shiny.The cut and assembled  apples are very "apeeling!"

Fifth Grade Chalk Sea Animals

This 2 week lesson involved studying and choosing a sea animal. Then drawing it onto black construction paper with glue lines. The next week when these are dry, students looked at the color wheel to choose analogous colors. Analogous  colors  are side by side on the color wheel. We colored in the spaces between glue lines with chalk, using analogous color choices. Using a finger we blended the chalk to meld the colors together. I think the artwork is stunning in its vividness.

Second Grade Van Gogh Artist Portraits

A few second graders are still working on their Starry Night pictures and self portraits as artists. They are really cute. The final step, not included here, but in the Art Show, is adding a decorated border using sparkle crayons and VanGogh -like spirals and lines.

Fourth Grade Value Hands

I save some of my favorite projects for the relaxed end of the year. This project teaches types of lines and shapes, color and mostly how to shade creating 3 values: light, medium, and dark. The students traced their hands 5 times to get curved lines and organic shapes. Then drew 5 straight lines with a ruler. Finally they chose 5 colors of colored pencil and began shading each shape in 3 values. It is difficult to color and blend the values so as not to create stripes of darker colors. But little by little as they color in a multitude of shapes, they start to get it. I will post finished pictures soon. It is taking us several weeks.

Showing Growth

This year, in accordance with SB191, I needed to document student growth. So I chose to save kindergarten art, using their self portraits that I teach several times a year. They are very developmental in their art as they transition to being 6 years old. I drew a rubric to measure their growth. 

Then the first week of school I asked them to draw themselves, with no instruction or demonstration. Just to get a baseline.

 In the middle of the year, around February I gave them a lesson on drawing ourselves.

The final lesson was in April. Here we were looking at our colors, eyes, hair skin,clothing, and adding details. The pictures show a tremendous amount of growth! I am really proud of these little artists!