Winter Cardinals Grade 1

I have been photographing the cardinals visiting my bird feeders this year and thought my first grade students would love to  see them.  After looking at the pictures and hearing stories about other backyard bird feeders we sketched some cardinals.  I had photographs for them to look at as well as some easy how to draw sheets I found on the internet.  Once the sketches were done we drew our final copy on blue construction paper and used tempera paint to add color. We looked at the cardinal photos and observed the different shades of red.  I mixed up a light, medium and dark shade for the kids to use when painting.  Once the paint dried we used cray-pas to add the branches.  We talked about a variety of trees you would see and the kids chose which ones they wanted to use.  We tried to blend different shades of the tree colors with the cray-pa.  The final detail was adding snow with white tempera paint. 

Owl Close Ups

Second grade students worked on zooming in on an object when drawing.  We also looked at some great owl paintings I found on Etsy. Each student chose an owl photograph to look at and practiced sketching enlarged views.   Final drawings were put on brown construction paper and we used oil pastels to add color.  The focus was on observing the colors, patterns and textures of the owls.  

Snowmen at Night

My fourth grade students created these snowmen pictures after looking at the books Snowmen at Christmas and Snowmen at Night written by Mark & Caralyn Buehner.  We loved looking at all the different kinds of snowmen and how they captured the look of reflected light in the illustrations.  I asked my students to sketch some different kinds of snowmen and think about how they positioned them on their paper.  We talked about cropping their sketches or zooming in.    I also showed them how to blend with the cray-pa and we talked about how shading helps make things look more three-dimensional and realistic.  The pictures really came out great.  The kids worked hard on them.  This has been one of my favorite lessons to teach.  Just be prepared to go through a lot of white cray-pa!

Here are some pictures of our snowmen.

Popplet in Art

Second grade students experimented with art materials and the Popplet app on the ipads.  Our first art class was spent experimenting with the art materials.  I made two stations, one with watercolors and one with cray-pa.  I asked the kids to experiment with different ways to use the materials and write down things that they discovered.  These are not new to use, we have used cray-pa and watercolors before but the focus was on using the materials in different ways and not what their papers looked like.  After half of the class the kids switched to the other art material.

The next art class I laid out our practice papers and their writing pages and introduced them to the application Popplet on the ipad.  We talked about what a mind map is and how we can create them using this app.  Popplet is a fun and easy app to use.  The kids were able to use it very easily.  I paired them up and each group chose one of the art materials to make a mind map about.  I asked them to come up with four qualities about their art material for their Popplet.  We only have a 40minute class so I had to limit them so that we would be able to save them to the camera roll and then upload to Dropbox.  I highly recommend this app and I am looking forward to using it in the art room again next year.  Here are some of our finished Popplets:

The next art class I let students make a finished piece of art using one or both of the art materials thinking about applying some of the things they learned in their practice.  Here are a few of their pictures.  This was our last art class of the year so I think the results might be even better if we had more time and no summer fever :)

 

Van Gogh Chairs

    

Fourth grade students looked at Vincent van Gogh's chair paintings and then created their own.  We talked about how to draw and color something so that it looks three dimensional.  We also experimented with our cray-pa, blending and creating textures.  Each student added personal touches to their pictures with objects that represent hobbies or favorite things.