Fourth Grade Tessellations

My fourth grade students looked at the work of MC Escher and created some of their own tessellations. After we made our shape we brainstormed what kind of animal we could turn it into.  This was both challenging and fun.  We used sharpie and twistable crayons to add color.  I asked my students to have some sort of pattern to their coloring.
Another fun app I found for the ipad is Amaziograph.  I thought it was a great complement to this lesson.  This app allows you to create drawings without symmetry, radial designs, and tiling symmetry designs (tessellations).   We focused on the tiling symmetry designs.  There were three different options to choose from.  The kids really loved this app.  Some other fun aspects of the app are color  mixing and playing with the brush softness and opacity.

Student Artwork

Amaziograph Creations

Videolicious App

This is a fun app to make and share videos. It is very easy to use and you can insert photos and videos. You can also add a clip of yourself explaining the video as well as music. The only downfall is you can only do a one minute video. I still think it would be great for students to create videos about their artwork with a reflection piece by them. Here is quick video I did skip the part where you can insert yourself talking about the slideshow. I think this app has great potential in the art room and will definitely try something with the kids some time.  Here is the website with information on this app:  https://videolicious.com/

Snapguide App

I found this great app called Snapguide.  Snapguide is a way to share and view step-by-step how to guides. You can also  create your own guides and share what you love making with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and more.   
I made a quick how-to guide for my first grade students to try it out.  You can add photos, text and video.  I love that you can share it, embed it in a blog, or even print it out.  
I think this would app would have a lot of great applications in any classroom.  I think it would be fun to have students create their own Snapguides as well.  My 8 year old son made one on how to make an origami Yoda and he had a lot of fun.  I look forward to using this with my students.

Mixed Media Collage

Second grade students looked at the work of Henri Rousseau for inspiration on this project.  We talked about his use of overlapping and value.  I love mixed media projects because students get a chance to practice using lots of different art materials.  We used tempera paint for our animals, watercolor wash for the backgrounds and construction paper and crayons to create the collage.  

Expressive Animal Paintings and Percolator App

Third grade students were inspired by Franz Marc, a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.  We talked about using color to show emotion.  We also practiced blending colors and double loading our brushes.  The paintings turned out great.  

We also used the ipad and the Percolator app to photograph and alter our paintings.  This app has some great effects.  Here are some of our paintings and the percolated version.

Sun Faces

For this project we really focused on the process of coming up with ideas and trying to make our sun faces unique and different.  Often in class students are quick to use the first idea that they come up with.  I was trying to get them to slow down and brainstorm lots of ideas before settling on their favorite.  I made a worksheet that I thought might help them with this process.  I also showed them some terra cotta sun faces and we talked about how different they all were.  I didn't leave the sun faces out while they were drawing though because I wanted to try to get the most original ideas.  The kids came up with some great ideas and very different sun faces. I think taking the extra time to do a little more planning helped.

Here are the planning worksheets:

After our sun faces were finished we photographed and edited them on the ipad using the Popsicolor app.  It's a fun app that gives the look of watercolor and ink. The students enjoyed giving their artwork   another different and creative look.

Underwater Collages

Third grade students used their sea creatures and ocean backgrounds from their stop motion animations to create these beautiful collages.  We talked about different ways to incorporate texture (visual and tactile), overlapping and variety of large, small and medium sized shapes.  

Here are the 4 finished movies created by the third grade classes.  I took all of the short clips made by each student and combined them all into one using imovie.  If you want to know more about how we made these movies see my earlier post on Stop Motion Animation

Mrs. Normandin and Mrs. Gregoire


Ms. Allison and Mrs Percy