the bucket of lessons

During the move to my new school I had to pull all my Tupperware buckets down from the tops of cabinets and was happy to find my "missing" bucket of middle school lesson samples from my first year teaching. Some of these lessons are winners and some are looser. No matter the result, I like seeing what I was expecting of my students that first year and reflect on what I will do differently with the lessons this time.

So in no particular order, and not promising to post one a day...a countdown of lessons from my first year of teaching to celebrate the arrival of year five teaching!

Lesson 1:
The star color wheel...er...color star...ugg...color wheel. I think I made this template up during my student teaching to show 5th and 6th grade students how to mix their colors. I like how the primary and secondary colors are in their own triangle and I have found younger students have an easier time getting the right intermediate colors in the right location when the colors are painted inside the hexagon. As this is more of a color mixing lesson for me than anything, I tend to give the black line template to the students and not make them draw it.

changes to make to the lesson: I want the colors labeled by the students. This means I just need to leave more white space around the star and find a way to label the inner colors. I also notice this sample doesn't have the most accurate green...but they could be from fading or the flash on the camera.

Things I've learned about this lesson:
*With 5th or 6th graders I receive in a middle school program that never have taken art before this can be a great confidence boosting lesson or a mess. To make it a great lesson have the students practice mixing colors on a large group color wheel first and then do their individual color wheel.
*This tends to be a guided lesson till students get that "ahah" moment and are ready to do the intermediate colors on their own.
*Make sure to remind the kids that red and blue are "strong" colors and a little goes a long way.
*I have observed younger students who have not been exposed to much color mixing...or art for that matter...can have a very hard time seeing the difference between blue and blue-purple. They sometimes also struggle with seeing the diffrence between red and red orange and orange. I tell the kids this is OK! They are training their artist eye and I am happy to go look at the colors they have mixed and help them figure out where they belong.
*When everything is dry OUTLINE in Sharpie! It cleans up the look of any color wheel

When I then ask students to make their complex color wheel that includes tints and shades in 7th grade they are ready for the advanced mixing thanks to practice with the star!

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!!???

Relax a little 5th grade!

I really like teaching 5th graders. As some drunk man told me said this weekend, "They are old enough to know better but young enough to want your love." How true drunk dude, how true.

My current 5th graders are intense little perfectionists. They always have been. It used to be when something did not turn out perfect, this was the first group to tear up the paper and break down in tears. They don't do that anymore (thank goodness!) but they still want everything just so. They constantly are asking, "Is this right? Is this line right, is this shape right, is this the right color, is this the right placement....on and on?" They burn through paper and erasers and have a strange fixation on using rulers for everything. They do beautiful work but it takes forever and I fear their fixation on the technicalities is keeping them from feeling the joy of creating art.

So this year I have been working hard to break them of this need for perfection so they can simply ENJOY creating art. I want them to like what they are doing, not just care if it is "right" or not. We have talked a lot about there not being a "right," answer in art. I spent most of October, November and December yelling...."whatever you have, it's ok!! stop asking." and happily they are getting much better. I feel so confident in their progress that I have decided to push my luck on our next two lessons. I just let them spend 5 classes on very technical Paul Klee geometric cities with tiny tinny shapes and tiny tinny brushes and all the rulers and protractors they wanted.

But now it is time to loosen up. We are going to look at Matisse (that good old wild beast) and the master of wonky art himself, Picasso.

Today we started doing a version of Matisse's goldfish. I gave them LARGE paper, I took away the pencils, confiscated the erasers and forced them to draw with big chunky oil pastels. There were no do overs and I went fast so their was not time to analyze every line. Then before they could think or complain we added our goldfish and I pulled the oil pastels from their clammy hands, replaced them with large brushes, a swirl of green paints and yelled, "5 min to make leaves and vines...GO!" One girl lamented..."mine looks like a kindergartner did it!" "Excellent," I cackled as I trotted around the room rubbing my hands. I heard the word loco being muttered a lot. But wouldn't you know it, when I collected their work it looked great! They are not the most sophisticated artworks ever, but for once I feel like their work has movement and life and JOY it it. We are going to keep working fast, and with lots of colors and at one point I am taking away the brushes and make them finger paint! Even if this lesson ends up being more process then product I'm excited to see the kids break out of their box and give into the simple act of creating art. I realized my goal IS to have them work as Kindergartners. Not judging, not analyzing, not perfecting, but simply experiencing and enjoying!!!

5th grade owls

you know the drill, click to enlarge

Whooo loves owls? I dooooooo! We did owl projects in 5th-2nd grade and everyone whooo saw them liked them. Let's start with 5th grade.
I am working on building the 5th graders confidence in drawing and getting them to make artistic choices. This was my first, "artist's choice," drawing lesson. I choose steps of the drawing that were required and steps that were optional. This allowed each student to personalize their drawing to their own taste, interest, skill level and desired amount of work. Ohhh look at me, I differentiated.

The drawing:
I started by guiding the class through a basic owl drawing. No tracers allowed for this one. We started towards the top of the paper and made a fist. I had them place their fist on the paper and "draw" around it with their finger. Then I had them use their pencil to draw a oval- circle shape about the size of their fist. Next we drew the body of the owl using a basic oval and the idea that the body should be about two heads high. At this point the kids added a beak, ears if they wanted them, design around the eyes and on the face and some w shaped lines for feathers on the tummy. Onto the wings. Students could make the wings laying to the side of the owl, stretching out or with one wing bent to hold something. Next we drew a branch for our owl to sit on and added the feet. Students could put leaves on their branch if wanted. Then I had students add a moon (in the phase of their choice) and stars if they wanted. Finally students could have their owl hold something. Some chose a heart, others had their owls hold baby owls or teddy bears or even a mouse for dinner. Everything was inked over with waterproof felt tip pen.

The painting:
After this was all done we spent two class sessions painting our owls (one class is still not done) I showed the kids how to mix different shades of brown with their watercolors and used touches of blue and purple to create different feather textures on the wings and body. We talked about painting one section of a drawing and then moving onto another area to let the paint dry before we went back to the first section to keep paint from bleeding. We practiced keeping our paint not to thick and not too watery. Eventually we did a wet on wet wash in the back and added salt to make the star/snow effect.

The results: I would say at leat 85% of the students felt good about their drawing. That is way better than usual. I was quite pleased with their drawings and creativity. Our painting results were less successful. We did our drawing on 60lb card stock...my "good" paper alternative. I can only afford to have students do one clay project a year and one project on good watercolor paper. As this was a new lesson I didn't want to risk the 5th grade's one piece of watercolor paper on it. I wish I had. Doing detailed watercolor painting on anything but watercolor paper tends to lead to so so results. Still quite a few kids got a pretty nice end product. It would be interesting to do this lesson with tempera and small small brushes, but I just love the look of watercolors.

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

Watercolor Doves

Let me start by saying this lesson came from That Artist Women who I've spent the year stealing lesson from in an effort to improve my student's painting skills. We tweaked the project just a touch. It took two 40min lessons with a 5th grade group.
Each student got a sheet of watercolor paper and were asked to cover the paper with lots of color. We used wet on dry and wet on wet technique. Then we dropped some salt on and THEN we put saran wrap on top. I learned to make sure the paint is wet but not too wet. The next day I gave the kids two dove templates and a selection of quotes from various people about the concept of Peace. I asked the kids to choose a quote they liked, glue down the dove and write their peace quote either around the dove or in the dove.

hidden animals

Done several years ago with a 5th grade class. The focus was on pattern and camouflage. Students used markers to fill a paper with colorful patterns in a radial design. Then they chose a template of an animal that uses camouflage to stay safe. I believe the choices were lizard, snake, rabbit and butterfly. Students tracked their animal onto tooling foil (you could also use card stock) and they cut out their animal. I then asked them to use a stylus to press 1 pattern into the animal. Next they placed the animal on the middle of their pattern paper and had to "hide" their animal in the picture by continuing the design onto the tin animal. Finally we taped the animal onto the paper by putting a little bit of foam core between the paper and tin animal. They turned out so well and everyone loved looking for the hidden animal.

Miro drawings

done by 5th grade students based on the art of Miro