5 weeks to go

Lessons for 2nd week of may

Life skills: Both classes will use fun foam stickers and kitchen tools to make pints (maybe some finger paint mono prints...maybe)

kinder: also needs to do printmaking, so stamps, kitchen utensils and fun foam stamps with tempera and brayers

1st: I have a thing for sheep... a bit of an obsession and am always trying out sheep projects. I will have the students take some green painted paper and tear it into several strips and overlap and glue them onto blue paper. I will then ask them to cut a fluffy cloud shape from some fun foam and glue it onto a scrap of cardboard. This probably will take a whole class. The next time we will make three stamp prints of that cloud shape...the body of the sheep and then add a head and legs

2nd-5th grade is working on faces and portraiture

2nd grade duel language is going to try out a guided line drawing of a Laurel Burch style cat face with bold color. I think we will do these on black paper and with oil pastel. The other 2nd grades will paint their dinos, set them aside and start drawing their cat face


3rd grade: doing self portrait is hard when you have no mirrors. I remember seeing a really fun idea where you draw a portrait of the BACK of a classmates head. I believe we will do that the first week and then try our hand at drawing faces the second week

4th: is going to get an intro to Picasso and cubism. I started reading when Pigcasso meet Mootise to one class...but it was long and not really holding their interest. anyway here is a version of the project we will do from Art Projects for Kids. this is a good one for drawing general faces, talking about eye, nose and mouth placement and front on and profile view while still not having the kids stress about it looking "real" or correct. Thanks Picasso.


5th grade will also look at the placement of facial features and how to add hair that makes a face unique. We will be working from the style of good old stretch neck Amedeo Modigliani . Here is a good lesson also from Art project for kids
However, I disagree with her that Modigliani placed his eyes high up on the face. A look at his art shows that he consistently placed the eyes correctly on the face but elongated the nose, chin and neck area of his subjects. To him, a long neck was a sign of beauty and perhaps sexuality. If you look at his self portraits and his few works focusing on men and young children you will notice he does not use an elongated style but dose keep the same simplistic, expressive way of rendering the facial features, particularly the eyes.
He had a rather sordid, soap opera like life, complete with public drunkenness and his wife throwing herself and their unborn baby off a bridge after is death. I tend to save those facts for when I'm teaching high school students about him.