I was out for a couple days with a sub earlier this year (around Valentine’s Day) and I found this easy dot picture idea. Since it was around Valentine’s Day, I left in my plans that kids could make hearts for their design or if they wanted to draw a different design that was fine too. The steps are simple and easy, which is great for a substitute lesson. I usually don’t leave paint for sub lessons, but I figured … Read more…
This may have been my favorite unit we studied all year! We looked at the whimsical landscapes of contemporary artist Justin Vining. Here is one of his paintings: We watched videos of him talking about his influences, watched time lapses of his paintings and emailed him some questions about himself. He responded to our questions in this interview I posted previously. This was a perfect artist to study for us because Justin lives in Indiana in a rural area and … Read more…
Wow, I’ve been so busy. Aren’t we all though, right? But really, this is one of the most busy times of year. Parent-teacher conferences this week and March is when the yearbook needs to be finished up. I also put up an art show at the public library (which I will post about later) and we have been working like crazy on our mural in the hallway! The mural is almost done and I am just waiting until everything has … Read more…
My students are really interested in science and I always love when I can connect an art lesson to things they talk about in their science classes. This unit came about because on a day when I was absent last month, one of our Science teachers subbed for my classes (we have quite a few part-time teachers at our school and teachers will often fill in for each other when there are absences.) The students went to the Science room … Read more…
Lines are an excellent starting point for lessons with Kindergarteners. To begin this line unit, we read the book Lines That Wiggle. The students used colored tape to make straight lines across their paper. We talked about horizontal, vertical, diagonal and ziz-zag lines. During the next class period, the students used tempera cakes to paint a variety of lines: wavy, loopy, dotted, dashed, squiggly, spiral, jagged and more. Aren’t these lovely and expressive? After the painting project, we moved … Read more…
I came across this beautiful technique at the Happy Hooligans blog. She practiced letter writing with glue, salt and paint. I thought this technique would be a fun experiment for my third graders and make beautiful fall leaf paintings. Here’s how this works. First, we used real fall leaves for inspiration while drawing. We drew leaves with pencil on watercolor paper. Then, we used regular Elmer’s white glue to outline the leaves. While the glue was still wet, we poured … Read more…
The Pacon company sent me some free supplies to try out. These are what I received. Since it is the summer and I’m not teaching any classes, I decided to do a project with my daughter who is 4 years old. We rolled out the fingerpaint paper and poured some Crayola fingerpaints . She wanted to paint her pony with the paints. I let her, because we have so many of those darn things from garage sales. She knew to … Read more…
