camouflage critters

I feel no shame saying, that like many of you I love this book:

I have used a lot of lessons straight from this book. The kids like the lessons and are willing to work hard on them. A few lessons use materials that are hard to get, hard to work with or not practical but overall I think it's a great book.

So one of my favorite lessons is the camouflage critters. I've done this lesson in the past with sharpies and tooling foil but this year we just used construction paper, tempra paint and oil pastel.

After having the kids divided the paper with white paint (use the smallest paint brush you have) the paint dried fast and I hit each kids paper with the hair dryer for 15 seconds and sent them back to their table to use 3 colors per section to make an interesting background. Some kids used only 3 colors for the entire background and others used all sorts of colors. This part takes about a class and half.

We spent some time practicing the animals in the book and going through the step by step drawing directions. The kids really liked learning to draw the chameleon (although they are not the easiest animal to cut out later and many kids opted for a turtle for their final drawing)

When the background is done we drew our animal on a second sheet of black paper and repeated the painting and coloring process. Some kids understood to match the pattern on their background and others were not that careful.

finally I had the kids cut out their animal and bring it and the background to me where i used cut up pieces of foam glued to the animal to make the animals pop off the page. 3rd grade results were ehhh but 4th and 5th grade results looked awesome.

YET when I sent these back to the classroom their homeroom teacher had to fish most of them out of the trash because once again the kids refused to take their art home saying it would just get thrown away there! Good lord why do I even bother!!???

4th grade owls

Our 4th grade project was a dumbed down version of this stunning lesson from That Artist Women. I honestly don't have her skill level with watercolor painting but I sure like to try her projects myself to help improve my own skills and then simplify them for my kiddos.

This project started back when I was out sick and I had two different subs do the drawing of the owl with the kids. I had the sub follow the how to draw owl sequence I posted back in my owl project idea post. I still don't know where the drawing sequence came from! Anyway I had left a stack of card stock with the first step, a letter W in the place and in the size I wanted the kids to stick to. It must have worked out because 95% of the kids had a usable drawing when I got back.


During our next time together I had the kids use a sharpie to go over their pencil lines. Then we used brown oil pastel to add feather and branch texture to our owls. Next I gave them a white oil pastel to draw leaves in the background. Some kids were too frustrated with the white and used yellow instead and that worked out looking pretty good also.


During our third session we painted our owls and used the warm colors to paint the background. Some kids asked to add splotches of green and I said that was Ok. We also talked a bit about analogous colors and why owls would be brown like the trees they roosted in (aka what are the advantages of camouflage) then we talked about what snow owls would be white...camouflage and adaptation. Just a nice little science tie in. I asked the librarian to read Owl Moon to the kids to go with the project but she never got around to it. Oh well...so goes it when you only have class for 20-ish min at a time.

Lessons for 1st week October

Steal, steal, steal, maybe a I stole a lesson from you!
We are still focusing on shape, line and pattern as our elements of art. We are also practicing our oil pastel and watercolor skills. No tempera paint till we show good control with our watercolor painting.

Kinder: Last week we read "The Dot" and made dot stamps. This week our dot will go for a walk and read "Lines that wiggle."

We will make a chart with different types of lines and make them with our hands
lines that go up and down, lines that go side to side, lines like a slide (diagonal) lines that make little hops, lines that make big jumps, lines that zig zag, and spin around and wiggle.
I don't think we are ready to do a oil pastel and watercolor line resist, we will save it for later on.
We will go back to our tables and play with string. Then we will practice drawing our lines as a group on chart paper. Finally if we have time each table will get a new chart paper, toy cars and one tin of paint that matches their table color. They will drive their cars into the paint and then leave tire tracts on the paper to make lines.

1st grade: no school Friday so no 1st grade this week

2nd: I like this Jasper Johnson inspired idea over at We Heart Art

There is no way to get through the alphabet in 27 min in a reasonable number of weeks.
Instead I will pint up regular size paper divided into 12 rectangles. 3 rows of 4. In row one the students need to draw a geometric shape in each box, in row two they need to draw a different type of line in each box, in the last row they will draw a different pattern in each box. We will then go over our lines with oil pastel and start painting each square showing control with our paint. NO black paint as it muddies our other colors.

3rd grade: I love the book Matthews Dream. So dose Teach Kids Art who has this great lesson
this is a great project because it has us working with shape and thinking about overlapping which I will need the kids to be awesome at for our next project. We will use standard size paper and each student will need to include these shapes:
square, triangle, circle, rectangle, oval, diamond, crescent and three organic shapes the kids make.
Each shape must overlap the other. Depending on time we will either use markers or oil pastel and paint it. Our third grade students are spaz monsters so I think we will have to stick with marker.

4th: Used shape to make falling boxes last week and worked with colored pencil. I realized we never use colored pencil (mostly because my classroom is not equipped with a real pencil sharpener argg low income arggg) I think we are done with shape and are ready to move onto line and pattern. We will do a modified zen tangle. I am inspired by this project from Blue Moon Pallet. Tami is the only other k-8 teacher I have encountered and she has awesome lessons to boot!

We will follow her project to the tee. Kids will go over their lines in marker and then color it in with colored pencil

5th grade: Will keep working on our op art circles. the 5th grade class I see twice a week is getting the yearly bike safety class so for their second project we will have a little side lesson learning how to draw a bike and design our own bike.

6th-8th-
Last week we finished our rhythm and movement drawings that I will post soon. They turned out so well. Then for a change I showed them how to draw a large, simple sunflower, ala Van Gogh. I then told the kids they would paint without brushes and I broke out the plastic butter knives the left over acrylic paint and are trying to paint like Van Gogh. Some kids are lovings this and some are not. I keep telling them to imagine they are making peanut butter and Jelly Sandwiches. We will play with this project for one ore day. Then it is time for our color wheel unit. I'll detail that in another post.

OH one last thing, I found this linked on the crafty crow...soooo cool! Website is Zakka life

Painted Ladies

This project was heavily inspired by one of Patty's lessons over at Deep Space Sparkle. I really want to link the lesson but I'm having trouble finding it! She had her students do pen and ink drawings of Victorian houses that were so fun to look at.

We have a fair number of Victorians around Portland so I knew it would be a subject matter my students were familiar with. I did this project with 4th grade and it took three 40 min class periods. My students in both classes were really engaged and interested in this project. Girls and boys alike. I think the students really embraced the idea of creating their ideal home/house.

To make sure all students had a good start and were working at the same speed I gave them a basic house template that we traced onto watercolor paper.

We looked at photos of Victorian houses for ideas. We discussed the flair, detail and the fun nature of Victorians. We looked at all the colors used on Victorian houses and students were excited to create their own house.

I then slowly guided students top to bottom on how to make their house unique. I demonstrated several types of roofs, windows, shutters, gables, dormers, bay windows, doors, front steps and the foundations.

Students then traced over all of their pencil lines with their black crayon or sharpie. Then students painted their houses. We agreed you had to use at least 3 colors, or at least shades of a color to make your house pop.

Last students cut out their houses and glued them onto black paper so they made a neighborhood and then added stars into the sky with glitter paint.

One HUGE mistake though! When we glued the houses onto the black paper we ended up covering the names. Next year I will have the students put a name label on the grass right under their house.