First grade students at our school study NH animals. Every year the kids create their animal out of Model Magic. Usually we create 3D animals but this year I decided to have them create a relief of their animal onto cardboard. See my earlier post on how we made them.
The students made careful sketches of their animal before we made them out of clay. We used those sketches to trace onto foam plates and make NH animal prints. We talked about basic printmaking tools; brayer, ink and bench hook. This was a very exciting process for the kids to watch.
We also helped make habitat murals for their classrooms. We used large paper and cray-pa to draw details for pond, field and forest habitats and then liquid watercolors to fill in the background. We got another use out of our animal sketches. We colored them in and glued them into the mural and used scraps to add more details.
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| NH Animal Relief |
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| NH Animal Prints |
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.
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| Student Artwork |
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| Amaziograph Creations |
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/
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.
