I am going to introduce this summer art challenge to my students next week. I did this summer art challenge a couple of years ago and we had a lovely display in the fall. The parents of the kids who participated thanked me for the ideas. Whenever their kids said they were bored, they told them to pick something from the list. It’s been awhile since I updated the list of challenges, so I went over it today to freshen … Read more…
I am so proud of how well my first graders drew these beautiful birds and I’m excited to share them with you. We started by reading the beautiful book The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon. This book is a wonderful connection to science as Audubon was a fascinating man who studied the migration of birds and painted them. Your budding scientists will love this story. The students looked at reference photos of birds from books. … Read more…
Our Kindergarten teachers approached me with a request for an art project for the back cover of their memory books. The kids have filled out pages in their memory books all year and they wanted a colorful back cover. I found a fun and easy way to make fingerprint art on the Frogs Snails and Puppy Dog Tails blog. Then, we used a great end of year poem by Helen H. Moore. We started by dripping water in pans of … Read more…
I love non-objective art. Non-objective art means that the art does not represent or depict person, objects or places. It is a picture with lines, colors and shapes as the subject. I teach this drawing project every year and the results are always beautiful. The children learn about concepts such as types of line, organic and geometric shapes, shading, values, variety of sizes, variety in general, overlapping, texture (from rubbing plates) and how to categorize non-objective, abstract and realistic art. … Read more…
My third grade classes studied color theory by using the color wheel. They learned about many different color schemes including warm, cool, neutral, primary, secondary, rainbow, analogous, monochromatic and complementary. First, they started by coloring in this Color Wheel worksheet. (I added monochromatic and neutral to the list.) On 8.5″ x 5.5″ white copy paper, the students drew a design that had rhythm through the use of repeating lines or shapes. We talked about how rhythm in art is similar … Read more…
I was honored to be included on a list of recommended blogs from Art Mouse House. I have just recently started following Art Mouse House and it is a very new blog. It already looks like it’s going to be a wonderful blog with lots of fresh ideas and clear explanations. I read her post about setting an intention and found myself nodding my head in agreement the whole time.. thinking, yep, that’s totally what I believe too! I’ve been … Read more…
This is just a quick post to share with you a simple and fun project for the end of the year.. paper hats! The kids started with a long strip of construction paper, drew designs on their hats with construction paper crayons, punched out shapes and added fun paper extensions from the scrap box. The strip was placed around their head and stapled by me. We got more use out of our paper sculpture techniques poster (below). Easy. Fun. Practice … Read more…
