That time of year again...

Clay time! the time of year where the art room fills with dirt and dusk and i will prob. get a stellar cold from all the lovely mold growing on the clay... but this year we have fun stuff going on... details and photos to come...

k-1 Pinch Pots (some 1st are going to make slab birds)
2-3 Slab Birds with added tails
4-5 Pinch Pot animals

The ideas all came from my wonderful blogger friends ... i will add their links to their projects when i get my detailed posts up and going...

Wonderful start so far..... now lets just see if i make it through all the germs and dust...

So much going on... so little time....

So many fun things have been going on this semester and time has flown past and i haven't gotten a chance to update... attached are a few pictures of some of the projects we have completed and soon i will get posts up for how we did each.

 K1--

Brown Bear Brown Bear

Value Pumpkins

23--

Letter Clowns

 LeRoy Neiman Lions

45---

Keith Harring Motion

Fauvist Colored Rescue Dog Portraits

PeacockS!!!!

My k1 kiddos created peacocks for this years fundraiser project.  The started by tracing a peacock body, adding a beak out of paper then drawing lines around it.  They then used the two primary colors and the secondary color it makes to add dots around the lines... they used their fingers to make these spots.  Once that was dry we added in little feather lines off of the main line in those same 3 colors to create the full feather.  Very fun and colorful results!

Piet Primary Colors

Simple, quick but got the lesson learned... i really wanted to drill in learning the primary colors with my K-1 students this year so we did a quick Piet Modrian Project to learn about the 3 primary colors.  We started by reading the book Color, by Ruth Heller, which explains the printing process and how the 3 primary colors overlap to mix and make every color printed.  This along with my attention cue of saying "Red, Yellow, Blue and the students responding "Eyes on you" helped them learn that those 3 colors were important.  The two facts i made sure they all knew was that those 3 colors combine to make many other colors, and that they are the only 3 colors that cant be made by mixing others.  The project was dont with cut black strips that they glued down making geometric boxes like Modrian and then they colored in boxes with only the 3 primary colors like he used to paint with.  Okay results in the project but they do all now know the 3 primary colors and why they are special.

Book we read:

Finished K students work:

Monet's Water Lilies

For the last  project of the year my K1 Kiddos played around with the starting stages of collage.  We started by watching the Movie: Monet

Then they painting a piece of 9x12 paper with different colors of blue and purple tempera cakes creating movement in overlapping to create their pond.  The next class they cut out bean shaped lily pads and used tissue paper(twisting the little square pieces on the back of their pencils) to create pretty little flowers to go on top of them.  We overlapped the two colors of green and then glued the little flowers on top and then onto the pond and they were done! Very quick and fun project for the end of they year! Great way to use up old pieces of used green paper too!

A Few Samples:

 Students were asked to have at least 2 big lily pads but if time allowed or they worked to small they could add more to their pond.

Matisse Gold Fish

This idea came from the Blog BlueMoon Palette (project here: http://bluemoonpalette.blogspot.com/search/label/goldfish)  and i loved it!!! It can be done quickly as a final week project like i am doing or made more elaborate and last for a few weeks! Over all my students have done a great job doing this project mostly independently.  I have been working on drawing with them an soon hope that they no longer feel they need steps to draw or to follow along with me as i draw and can just see something and draw it, but that takes time so for this one i did a simple step by step on the board and told them to draw!  We also talked about foreshortening and negative space with this project and so far students from grades 1-4 have done a SUPER job!

Mothers Day Flowers

I found this sweet little projects on the art blog Kids Artist this morning and had to try it out! http://kidsartists.blogspot.com/2011/02/wild-flowers.html

Changed it a little to work with what i had on hand and had the kids use different colors of Green construction paper crayon on 18x12 black paper to create the stems then using just the Tip of the brush the created the yellow center with Tempera Paint then used the same technique for the white petals.

LOVE how they are coming out and only took ONE 40min class to complete!

Thanks for the great idea Kids Artists!!!!

Peacocks!

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K1 made these fun pattern Peacocks!  They started by tracing a body template of a peacock then cutting it out and gluing it to their paper.  They then added the feathers looking at the patterns in real feathers.  They started by adding the circles with 3 colors then a BUNCH of little feather lines to show the texture in the feathers. Some came out better than others but for K-1 they aren't to bad.

Japanese Cherry Blossoms

Perfect project for K-3!  The photo pretty much explain it all but the quick steps were:

1- paint the paper one color
2- Use paint wash and a straw to blow across the page from all angles to create the branches
3- add small red&pink abstract shapes to create the look of the cherry blossom on the branch