It has been several weeks since our Fine Arts Night and I have been waiting until things settled down here to write all about it.

Many, many thanks to my co-worker Katie for taking photographs of the event!

“Wild About the Arts” Fine Arts Night

We had our first ever Fine Arts Night.  The night combined musical performances, an art show and art activities to celebrate the arts!  We decided on an animal theme. We displayed one artwork from each child in the school.

We had 3 different blocks of time for performances by different aged groups and they were about 15-20 minutes each. Each class sang about 2 short songs. We alternated with performances and then about 30 minutes of art time/refreshments/gallery walking. I set up the rooms with art activities and supplies, then we had 8th graders & parents volunteer to keep an eye on them. It was very self-explanatory with pictorial examples for ideas.  We had several parents also help organize refreshments and help set up the artwork!

Artworks were mixed up between the grade levels, K-8.

We had paintings, drawings, collages, paper mache masks and clay projects.  A great variety with a lot of creativity!

The theme of animals was a “loose” theme.  There were some dragons, unicorns, made-up creatures and even several appearances of a microscopic organism called the “water bear” (see below, next to the eagle picture.)

These were Arctic Animal reports the 2nd grade students made in their Language Arts class.  In art class, we painted pictures of the animals with watercolors.  These were used as the covers for their research reports.

Each students painted several butterflies that were used for a giant butterfly mural of wings.  The remaining butterflies were placed on other bulletin boards.  We had a LOT of butterflies!

We also had art activity rooms!  We set up 4 rooms with older students and parent volunteers to help run the rooms.  Each of the rooms was “self-explanatory” with minimal directions needed.  We placed directions and picture inspirations in plastic stands or laminated them to lay on the table.

First station was Animal Origami.  We used this simple dog origami sheet, fish, and cat origami.  I am all about the cute and easy origami.  Origami is not my thing and anything more complicated than these are very frustrating for me!  Origami was the most popular room.  It was always crowded.

Next was a Paper Plate Mask and Paper Bag Puppet station.  I set out paper bags, paper plates, construction paper scraps, googly eyes and markers.  I printed out many examples of masks and of puppets for inspiration.  The kids got so creative with these and they could make their masks and puppets however they wanted.

The next station was line drawing environments around pictures of animals:  Line Art ATCs.  I got these sheets from the Art Projects for Kids blog by Kathy Barbro.  Here is another one.  We just printed out many copies, laminated some examples and set out black pens.

Finally was a room with two large posters with picture frames printed on them.  The directions were to draw and color animal portraits in the frames.  Neither of these were filled up at the end of the night.  I think people liked the projects where they could take something home.  But, it was still a fun idea.  I downloaded the free file from the Crafting Chicks, at the bottom here, and I had it printed as an oversize black and white engineering print at Staples.  It was under $10 if I remember correctly.

We had balloons and many visitors!

We had two different scavenger hunts for kids to fill out as they walked around the art exhibits.  I was writing out the questions and realized it was getting too long… so I made it into two hunts.  Many kids happily did both!  The questions were things like “Find the multi-colored giraffe.  Who made it?”.  Kids who turned their scavenger hunt back to the front received a small piece of candy (again, monitored by a parent volunteer.)

And there were many animal themed refreshments!  Of course, these beauties did not last too long.

Our other art teacher, Jayne, decided to organize a butterfly wings mural as a photo op for families. We have seen many of these fantastic wings murals on the Facebook art teacher groups.  I believe it all started with Cassie Stephen’s What Lifts You mural.  A group of 8th graders assembled all the butterflies into the shape of butterfly wings.  Kids in all of the grades made these butterflies.

We had SO MUCH FUN!  It was a great turn out and we all felt very excited and proud of our artwork. The only thing we decided we would change next time is to spread it out a little more throughout the halls (it was quite crowded) and perhaps combine it with a Scholastic Book Fair in the library.

Do you have any ideas for Fine Arts Night that you would like to share?