Veteran's Day Flag

I wanted to post a photo of the flag as it appeared on Veteran's Day. It was a learning process for me as I assembled hundreds of painted sticks. The sticks warped as they were glued and had to be coated with epoxy to hold them together.. The result is shiny and very personalized. I enjoyed watching the kids search for their stick. It has had many admiring views from students, parents, and faculty. We may have to leave it up for a while!

First Grade begins Painting Job Self Portraits

Here are a few early paintings. Today we only painted ourselves. Next week we will paint the background. It looks pretty blobby at this point. We will go over our drawing lines later.

Veteran's Day

This year I will again help decorate for our special Veteran's Day concert. Our new music teacher, David Parker, has been working hard with 4th and 5th grade choirs. This year I have had every student decorate with paint, a red, white or blue,wide stick. I am going to glue them together to make a flag of the United States of America. This flag will be hung right outside the gym door to welcome our Veterans, parents, and students. I will post the finished flag soon!

Van Gogh for kinders

Kinders heard a wonderful story called "Camille and the Sunflowers", that was about  about Vincent Van Gogh. They looked at many of his lovely paintings.  They observed a huge vase of sunflowers in the art room and drew them. This week we made clay sunflower pinch pots. It will be a few weeks before they are fired and glazed, but they are so cute!

Forth Grade begins the Grand Canyon

Fourth graders recently learned about the Grand Canyon via slides I created. They learned how erosion made this beautiful National Park. We discussed the pasts of a landscape as we drew. The foreground is at the bottom of the page, the middle ground is about halfway up. Then at the top of the page we drew the background and small mountains to show: "off in the distance". Some class began painting theirs, using the double dip method to  mix colors right on the paper. Another P Palmer lesson.

Third grade Pig Kahuna nears completion!!!!

Fergus the pig is ready to be cut out and glued to his surfboard! The surfboards are so clever as the children draw old fears they used to have, but aren't scared of any more!

Fifth Grade starts Pacific North West Masks

We had a brief slide show about art of the PNW, which is along upper Canada and the shore.
We learned which colors are predominately used( black white red), what the masks are made of (cedar), and typical shapes used. The masks were first drawn as half a mask in black oil pastel. Then the papers were folded and rubbed to transfer the design to the opposite side. This technique is important as the masks are  symmetrical. Then other oil pastel colors are used to fill in the mask. So far they look very fierce.
Thanks PPalmer for the lesson plan!