Lego Minifigure Self Portraits

This project was a lot of fun.  Everyone loves lego minifigures.  I asked my fourth grade students to create a self-portrait minifigure style.  They had to include things that represent themselves into their picture. We used cardboard to create layers and give some dimension.  The relief made it easy to talk about foreground, middleground and background.  We also talked about value.  Students created value scales and then tried to color the foreground the darkest value, middleground a medium value and the background the lightest. 

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.  

Sunflower Paintings

Third grade students learned about the sunflower paintings by Vincent van Gogh.  I found a great site called Art History Mom that gave some great kid-friendly information about his paintings.  Check it out at:http://www.arthistorymom.com/post-impressionism/a-flower-delivery-to-you-and-your-kids-from-vincent-van-gogh/
I love this project.  They always turn out great and the kids learn a lot.  We talked about painting with brushstrokes, variety, overlapping and value.  Here are some of our finished paintings.  

Recycled Cardboard Faces

First grade students learned about creating art from recycled materials or found objects.  We looked at found object FACES made by artist Jim Shores.  You can see his work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimshoresart/sets/1007675/. 
We also looked at the Faces iMake app for the iPad.  There are some cute, short videos that show how to arrange objects in different ways to create faces.  
I randomly cut scraps of cardboard on the paper cutter in a variety of sizes.  We spent one class just experimenting with using the shapes to create different faces and showing different emotions.  
The next class students created their final design and glued it together.  We use tempera paint to paint the face and blended cray-pa for the features. 
Students also got a chance to use the Faces iMake app on the ipad to create a face too.
Here are some of our finished pieces:

Pixel Portraits

Second grade students had fun creating pixel portraits using graph paper and the iPad app Pixel Booth.  At first it was a little bit of a challenge to think of making their people using the square shape instead of using lines.  I also found an online pixel drawing site that the kids could use on my Smart Board.  Students took turns using the iPad app while they were drawing on the graph paper.  I think they turned out great and the kids had a lot of fun making them.

Bedtime Story Quilts

First graders do a concert every year at our school called Dreaming Around the World.  I thought this project would be great to go along with the bedtime theme.  We looked at Faith Ringgold's story quilts and talked about our favorite things about bedtime and then drew pictures about it.  We also looked at pattern and how to use lines to create patterns.  Each student had 5 strips of paper and used crayons to create patterns on them.  We painted a watercolor wash over them.  When they were dry I cut them up into 4 inch squares to use as the border.  Check out our finished artwork.  

4th Grade Color Super Heroes

When my son was in first grade he made a project with the theme Primary Color Super Heroes.  I loved the idea and knew that I wanted to do something with my kids using this theme too.  I thought it would be perfect for my tinfoil people project that I had planned for fourth grade this year.  

In class we reviewed the color wheel(primary, secondary, intermediate colors) as well as warm, cool, analogous and complementary colors.  We also talked about tints and shades.  It was a lot of information but we had talked about all of it at different times throughout the years.  

Their challenge was to create a super hero that had a power that was connected to color somehow.  The kids had a great time coming up with different powers but the challenge was linking it to the color wheel.  We had some really creative powers.

The armature for the super hero was made from heavy duty aluminum foil.  Here are some directions I found on Pinterest.  Here is a link with great directions:http://2peasandadog.blogspot.ca/2013/03/tinfoil-sculpture-art-lesson.html

Once the armature was made we covered them with paper mache.  This was a little challenging for the kids but they did a good job with it.  

The kids made sketches of the ideas so they were able to refer to them when it came time to paint and decorate their superheroes.  I had a variety of odds and ends that they could use for capes and other decorations.  They really enjoyed this part.  We used cardboard to create stands for them too.

Here are some of the finished pieces.

Some sketches

Our final part of the project was to use the ipad app ComicBook! to create a comic page of our super hero telling about them and their powers.  This is a great app and the kids had fun with it.  Here are some of their comic book pages.