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.

Color Wheels and iPads

Third grade students had some fun learning about the color wheel and how to mix the secondary and intermediate colors.  First we used tempera paint in the primary colors to paint a color wheel.  I gave them a blank template for this.  Next, we used a variety of circles (yogurt and other types of covers) to create a design on 12x 18 paper.  We talked about overlapping, filling our space and having some of our shapes going off of the paper.  Students could also add a few ruler lines to break up the background if they wanted to.  A black crayon was used to trace the final design before painting.  We used watercolor paints to fill in the shapes.  I gave each student just the primary colors again and a check list with the secondary and intermediate colors on it.  Students had to mix all of the colors on the list for their paintings.  When the paintings were dry we attached the colors wheels using 3D O's.  

As a review we also played the color mixing game on the smart board and I also made a color quiz using Google Forms that students took at the end of the project.  Google forms is a great assessment tool. I'll share more about how we use this in class in another post.  

I found this great website on Pinterest about iPads in art that I found really interesting.  I loved the idea of editing a picture using multiple apps.  I had played around with it a little before and thought that this would be the perfect project to do it with.  I chose 6 apps for the kids to use.  They photographed their painting and then could use any of the apps in any order and combination to edit and change their photo. The six apps that were used are:  Etchings, Glaze, DistressedFX, Percolator, Tangled FX and Snapseed.  Each photo was saved to the camera roll and then all of the finished photos were saved in their Google accounts.  Here are some of our results.  Aren't they amazing?

Second Grade Snow Angels

I found this great art project at Deep Space Sparkle, an art blog that I love to read.  As soon as I saw it I knew I had to do it with my kids.  It was the prefect winter project.  I purchased the book and lesson from the site.  I highly recommend her site.  She has lots of great lesson ideas for art teachers but also lots of great ideas parents could do at home with their kids.  

This lesson was great for teaching value and symmetry as well as practicing  painting and collage techniques.  The kids had a great time creating and they all came out great.  Here are a few of them.  To see them all  just visit our project page on Artsonia.

Clay Snowmen

Here are a few reasons why I love this third grade clay snowmen project:

• It is a simple clay project that can be made in one 40 minute class
• It is a great confidence builder and practice with slip and score (we say scratch and attach)
• It is a great project that reinforces molding and pinching clay 
• This project doesn't require a lot of clay or underglazes and glaze
• Nice review of firing process
• Great starter project for review before a bigger clay project later in the year
• The kids LOVE them
• They always turn out great

Winter Starry Night

My second grade students looked at Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night picture.  We used cray-pa and watercolor resist to create our night skies and then collaged our trees and villages on top.  Details were then added with color pencil. We also used white paint for snow and a little glitter glue to add sparkle to the moon and stars. 
I tried to encourage my students to add some things that they noticed about van Gogh's artwork into their own.  Many of them added texture, used different lines similar to his brushstrokes, and added different shades of colors in the sky, stars and trees.

As a review we used the app Popplet on the iPad to make mind-maps about what inspired them about starry night.

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.