Henri Matisse is a popular artist to teach about in the elementary art classroom. I’ve seen a lot of Matisse-inspired artwork from other art teachers. His artwork is bright and colorful and lends itself well to teaching about shapes. We read the book Oooh! Matisse and watched the video Dropping in on Matisse The students learned about organic shapes and geometric shapes. They also used their fine motor skills to use shape punchers.
These lovely clay butterflies were made by the 1st graders. Each student traced their hands to make the wings. Some of the little parts fell off, so I would recommend making sure that the kids don’t roll their slabs too thin. I found this lesson in the book, The Clay Lady Way Textbook. I was able to flip through this book at one of the National Art Ed conferences and decided it would be worth the investment.
Every year, students in grades 5-8 participate in a local contest called the Yahara River Writers Contest. There are categories in poetry, editorials and editorial cartoons. In art class, we study editorial cartoons. We analyze cartoons for their use of exaggeration, symbolism, irony and point of view. Cartoons for the Classroom has an amazing selection of lesson plans for studying editorial cartoons. There are over 200 printable cartoons with questions and explanations about them. We also watch this video The … Read more…
In this project, we studied the repeating patterns found in Islamic art. These students have studied about Islam in their Social Studies class. This project also ties into geometry and math. I have been doing this project for a few years now, and the results have always been stunning! I originally found this lesson in an old School Arts magazine from the 90’s. Last year, I posted a tutorial with steps to achieve the designs.
The 2nd graders have been learning about the characteristics and functions of Alaskan masks as well as the cultural traditions of Native Alaskans. They made a 3-D mask using typical characteristics— animal or human features, fur, feathers, appendages, hoops around the mask.
There are almost 200 blogs in the Art Teacher Blog Directory. Have you added yours? I was going to highlight some of the newer entries and then Mrs. Hahn posted some spotlights highlighting the blogs that are on the Art of Ed list, which reminded me that I was going to post about some of the newer entries in this blog directory. So, anyways… one of the newer blogs that I discovered is Ms. Branigan’s website. She has some interesting … Read more…
If you haven’t seen Beautiful Oops yet, you must find a copy and look at it.. It’s my favorite book ever! The first graders looked at this book in class and then they were presented with a creative challenge. Each child chose a piece of colored paper with a hole in it. Holes of various sizes were pre-cut into papers of various colors. They had to figure out how to turn this “oops” piece of paper into a work of … Read more…
