Patterns in Nature

One of the things I love about teaching at a Christian school is that we can relate our artwork to our faith.

I found this project on Mrs. Brown's Art Class website. I just found this site a couple weeks ago. I introduced my 3rd grade class to Andy Warhol's art style. Then we talked about the 5 main patterns in God's creation (check our Mrs. Brown's website for the 5 patterns). This is my sample, but I plan on finishing the project with the students tomorrow. We started in pencil, outlined in black, and are coloring with bold markers. The kids are doing a great job!

I wanted to give my 2nd graders a way to remember the color wheel so we made it out of fruit. I found this idea on the KinderArt website and adjusted it a little. I directed the students in their drawing and showed them how to color the pictures to give them some shape. Some of the fruit ended up really small, but sometimes you can only do so much. :o)

I love my 2nd grade class. There are only 9 of them and they love anything we do in art class.

Parrot

I did this directed drawing with my 3rd grade class. It is from Mona Brooks' book Drawing with Children. When I first started teaching art someone gave this book to me and I have used it a lot. Last year I taught this class how to draw pictures with 5 basic shapes. This picture is using those shapes. The students follow directions as I draw it on the overhead projector. Once they are finished drawing it in pencil they outline the entire picture in black pen/marker. Each student colored their parrot with either warm or cool colors. Their background was up to them. It was fun to see what they did.

California

So apparently I have issues with rotating pictures. I've done this on a few blogs I do. Oh well, you get the idea.

This is one of the art projects I did with my 4th grade class. It is funny, because I remember making this when I was in 4th grade. But I think mine fell apart rather quickly. I cut up cardboard for the students and they traced the shape of California. I have several tracers that I passed around and saved them for next year. We used celluclay for the mountains around California. This project took several weeks. I only see the 4th grade class once a week so that is why it took so long. The students did a great job and it related to what they were learning in class.

Great blog

This blog is one place I check for great ideas when I teach. I've used several things from here.

I just pulled a few ideas from here that I plan on using in the next couple of weeks at school.

http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/

Happy New Year!!

Always looking for more ideas

This has been a great year so far, and it is hard to believe that the semester is almost over! Here are a few things we have done recently. I love it when I find new ideas and they work. :o)

I had my junior high students do this assignment. It gave them the opportunity to get to know the elements of art. It was also a great project to take up extra time we had.

The 1st grade class did this project. I'll have to take some pictures of the ones they made because they are adorable! It is called "Looking out the window". I found it on another website. I'll post it on here when I find it again. We took about 3 weeks to complete it. But it was very fun.

New Ideas

Some time this spring I went to an ACSI Art Festival. There was some great artwork. I got some great new ideas. Here are a few of them.

This one was neat. I've done something similar to this. The students get one picture to glue onto their paper and then draw around it to create one picture. I love these projects because the students come up with so many different ideas. When I did this kind of project I really emphasized that the students needed to think of something unique to draw. My students know that they are not to copy a friend sitting next to them. Original work is very important. (If I remember correctly a 2nd grade student did this piece)

I was very impressed with this piece of art. This was done by a 3rd grade student. He or she used oil pastels. I wish my school could afford this art medium. This is something I could totally do in one of my classes. I think I would spend one class time talking about Picasso.

I love the color the student used in this artwork. They are bold and bright. I tried something like this with the 6th grade class last year, but it didn't work so well. I might be a little over critical. We did it a little differently though. I had the students draw a profile and then connect that to a front view of their head. (It is hard to explain at the moment) On the profile side of the face the students used chalk pastels that represented what their faces actually looked like. On the other half of the picture the students used markers to draw things that they liked or ways to describe them. Once finished they cut out the shape of their head and glued it onto a piece of construction paper. Some of the students put a lot of effort into it and they turned out really well.