Ocean lessons

Themes so far this month: Chinese New Year and Valentines day
Theme to finish the month. The Ocean!
Who doesn't love the ocean. There are a ton of great ocean ideas out there and fish and sharks and octopus and starfish and so forth are familiar and easy shapes for students to draw. Working on ocean art lets us concentrate a bit more on the media and technique involved in the project. But first some classes have some Ketchup to do...sorry catch up;)

Monday: NO School. Relaxing at home with my hubby and dog who has his head on the key board right now making little whinny noises so I will pet him.

Tuesday:
4th grade: Needs to complete new years Tigers. Next week will work on pastel resist ocean life. 3rd grade will be doing the same.
Deep Space Sparkle
6-8th- making good progress on dragons and carp windsocks
3rd- Masi: Draw outline of angel fish and seaweed. Put aside and finish assembling new years dragons
3rd- Hunter: has not done clay yet: clay slab fish
oh dear...either that Artist women or Teach kids art (I think the later)

Wednesday: late start day
6-8th china projects
1st grade: 1st and 2nd have a choir concert coming up and we always put up their art. this whole ocean unit is basically for that. I have a stack of base color painted paper that I had the kids make for some future collage project. And now we have one. I want to do this pretty general ocean project. I'll have some templates for the kids, a fish, a octopus, a shark, seahorse and a turtle for the kids to trace and cut out. Then they can add extra color to the top with paint. We will cut out the sea life, glue to turquoise paper and then collage on sea weed, coral and so forth. I expect this to take two full weeks.
Deep Space Sparkle

Thursday:
5th grade: Will do a glue and pastel sea life drawing. That is if my black paper EVER shows up. I asked the school secretary to order it 4 weeks ago! The major issue with glue resit is getting it to dry. So day one draw, go over our lines with glue, set them to dry and then color a nice ocean life coloring sheet till next class. Tips with the glue: Keep the tip of the glue touching the paper. DRAW BIG, don't make stuff to detailed. Don't squeeze to hard. Keep glue moving. Realize blobs will happen and are OK. If you have money to spare (I personally don't) Elmer's now makes glue "sticks" that are more like glue pen's that have white glue in them and two size tips that make doing this really really easy. Each pen lasts about one project and costs about $2 at Wal-mart and can be re-filled. If I do this with a summer camp group it will be worth the cost but it's a no go for my low income classroom.


2nd grade
I don't remember who's blog this came from, but she mentioned she had read a book called, "I'm the best artist in the ocean" and had painted mustachtisohed giant squids with her students. I don't know why I find this soooo ridiculously amusing but I do. So I got the book and we will read it and then go draw our own squids wearing mustaches and holding paintbrushes. Ask me what the deep down artistic value this has and I'm not sure, but I'm the art teacher and I want to do this book and so we will. If I had my dream world I would have the kids make paper mustaches and use masking tape to put them on their upper lips. These two classes get way to excited way to easily to do that but maybe one day.


Friday: God I even feel tired just looking at all the lessons we do in one week and this isn't even addressing the middle school classes.
5th grade again: We need to finish up the carp. Cut apart mouth. Glue up sides. Roll tops over a pipe cleaner. Punch holes in mouth for string. Tie strings. Find a way to display....hum. If done early I want them to get done with their Faith Ringold Story quilts before letting them work more on their ocean stuff.

Kinder: Finish up those trains. Let's see we still needed to put on last train body shapes. Cut out wheels and the bar connecting the wheels and then put on a cotton ball or two for smoke. I would like to double mount these with a name tag. That will take our full 20 min.

January project progress/week 4 lessons

Wow it has been a long and grueling last three weeks. Perhaps the hardest three weeks I have had aside from my very first month of teaching, I'll say even harder because back then I just didn't know what I was doing. Now I do know what I'm doing and they are still reducing me to tears, migraines and being physically ill by the end of the day. We have made some progress on our theme of the month of "think warm" though.

5th grade: The weaving unit that will NEVER end. We looked at a PowerPoint and then video's from U-tube to learn all about weaving. We practiced weaving with paper. We tried weaving paper baskets which was way to hard and flopped so instead we wove friendship bracelets (BIG hit) and did circular weaving on plates. One class is STILL trying to get their plate weaving done. I have told them we are not having choice day till we get through this stupid weaving issue. The other 5th grade (the one I see twice a week) made the peace dove paintings this week and they turned out really well and the kids were surprisingly into them, they loved using the "big kids" watercolor sets and choosing their peace quotes. Class one will finish their circle weaving. Class two will talk about quilting and on day one (and possibly day two) make a Faith Ringgold memory quilt bock and learn about the use of quilts in the underground railway and how Ringgold uses them now to tell the story of African Americans. If done in time we will read Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and look at this great website that has a glossary of what different types of quilt squares might have meant. I also like how they have make their sample pictures for some of the quilts. It looks like they have used crayon wax resit to make each part look like fabric. I think I'll print up four designs (see below) and have the kids use the wax resit method to make one block to go with our memory blocks.

4th grade: choice day confusion put us a week behind but both groups are also almost done with their weaving units. both have now done paper weaving, one with warm and cool color paper that they made and one with regular paper. Group 2 is doing small paper plate weaving that we should get done this week. Thank god. Other group will make a Faith Ringgold memory quilt block.


3rd grade: has been a battle royal with two out of three groups, which is odd, usually 3rd grade is the happiest of grades, but this group was not very happy as a whole last year and seem to continue to have issues with each other. Anyway we got through our paper weaving and we did some found object weaving on cardboard looms. We also talked about hibernating bears and learned how to draw a brown bear and a polar bear and made a Arctic watercolor back ground for our polar bears. One group should have had choice day this week but started arguing with each other, pouting and acting like pre-scholars within the first 10 min of class and had choice day removed till next week when we will try again. We will end with our 'quilt' unit by reading Tar Beach written by and featuring the work of Faith Ringgold (good tie in to celebrating African American artists with MLK day and Black History month coming up) We will draw, paint or collage a memory we have and then put a paper quilt boarder around the edge. I will pre cut squares of scrapbook paper for that part because of what we learned about our scissors and fabric with second grade...see bellow.

2nd: We did paper weaving. We learned about hibernating brown bears thanks to OLD BEAR, we learned to draw and paint a brown bear. We painted a background for our bear. We read Grandmother Winter and talked about quilts and started cutting and pasting fabric to make crazy quilts. We learned that our scissors are crap and only a 1/4 of them cut fabric and my paper cutter is too dull to cut fabric and well, it's going to take two classes to finish cutting the fabric. I'm not giving up though. We will cut, glue and then use markers to make the 'stitching' on every one's patch for our large class quilt. If I get time I will try to pre-cut some fabric for them. Quilting will take us till the end of the month.

1st grade: Let's see we did a collage scarf with pattern to go with A Snowy Day and a painting with Old Bear, this week we read Grandmother winter and started a quilt "puzzle" as the kids are calling them where they have to cut, find the matching color word and shape and glue the quilt square together. It will take us another week to get these done with maybe a little free draw time at the end. That will get us till the end of the month.

kinder: We started the month with some grandmother winter and quilt puzzle squares that turned out really well but where very time intensive on my part. Then we practiced our primary colors with kinder Kandinsky paintings last week. This week we looked at different types of lines and used watercolor paint to make a line collection painting. I realized we had not worked with watercolors at ALL this year. Yikes. Not sure what we will do this week. I want to work on shape again so I think we will use shapes to build cars and trucks and other things that move. Fantasy vehicles so to speak. I will have templates of different shapes for them to trace around and then color in. A variation (made easier for our limited time) of this lesson from Deep Space Sparkle. On the other hand I'm not sure how into trucks and cars some of the girls will be. Sorry if that sounds sexist...maybe I should go with something more gender neutral like this bird but made with shapes that we can trace from a template. They just don't have the small moter control yet to draw on their own...I tried it with the 2nd grade earlier this year and they barely could draw the birds.
. or

as for the 6-8th graders they finished up their painted landscapes, and their Greek pottery. They are now working on their their paper mosaics and I'm working on squeezing some money out of the school for a real mosaic for the library. The Romans were interested in portraiture and making faces look unique. We are going to learn to draw faces using the grid method.

I first did this with a group of 5th grade students four years ago and they loved it and they turned out well. For that project we used images of people playing sports.

Then three years ago I did it with a group of 7th graders using photos of themselves. They HATED the project. This year I will not force the kids to draw themselves. I will let them choose from a random selection of interesting faces. Sometimes its just having to look at a photo of themselves and feel like it is not turning out to look JUST like them that creates the roadblock. I have learned since my last attempt to print one or two inch grids onto overhead transparencies and then lay that on top of the picture, that helps the kids get a correct gird and not get stressed about drawing their own. Second I have learned to only let them do a 1:1 ratio or a 1:2 ratio. Any larger than that and we have issues with distortion and propitiation.


The mosaic and grid drawing should take us to the end of January, meaning two weeks of Greece, two weeks on Roam and then we will start our two weeks on China that will cumeulate end about the same day as the start of the Chinease New Year!

lessons for second week of october

Into the second full week of October. Two classes have earned all 4 gold stars and will get a choice day in class. One third and one fourth grade class. A bunch of other classes are on their 3rd gold star. I am going to make a pocket for each station and have each kid put their name on a stick and put their stick in the pocket of the station they want to go to. No more than four kids per station. We will switch after 15 min. To make it fair I will have to put their sticks in a cup and pull them randomly so we don't have fighting over stations. When we switch we will go in reverse order so the kids that choose first will choose last and vice verse.

For the rest of the week it will look like this

Life skills: leaf rubbing (hand over hand), tape leaf down with tape doughnut, tape down paper
Kinder: Finish coloring, cutting and pasting fish from two weeks ago
First: Leaf rubbings with side of crayon and fall color tempera wash
2nd and 3rd: Where the wild things are unit
4th and 5th: Aboriginal symbols and dot art, perseverance drawing practice
6-8th: Get all aboriginal art done! Fall leaf ATC, fall batiks

Notes:
1st. Rubbing needs to be done with a dark color, black, purple or dark blue. Paper needs to be removed. If I could melt down old broken crayons in the silicone tray to make chubby crayons that would help. same watered down tempera wash that the 3rd graders used

2nd and 3rd. Read the book. Two art projects, watercolor monsters and sailboat
I would like to add a collage element to these by using goggle eyes and some fun foam shapes maybe.

In the book Max travels home on a sailboat so we are going to do some texture painting, collage and perspective with this lesson. This project is originally for younger kids but I think it will work well for my kids. Pretty high success rate I hope. I like the idea of making texture in the water and sky and the look at perspective by having larger in the front and smaller boat in the back. I think this is about three weeks worth of projects.

4th and 5th: Trying to teach persistence is the new theme for the school. I want the kids to see that much like practicing a sport or a musical instrument that if you practice drawing a object repeatedly you will get better at it. I am going to have about 12 how to draw sheets to choose from and have the students choose something that they find interesting. Then for the first 3 min of class each time they come for the next two months they will parctice drawing their object. I hope they will see improvement (fingers crossed) We will then look at a short powerpoint of aborginal dot art and look at the symbols chart. Then we will play the tell a story table game that I played with the older kids. Next students will choose 1 to 3 symbols and sketch them on paper and paint them in a solid black. Let dry till next class. We will then dot paint them in using rows of solid color around the black images. Only three colors of paint will be used. Hopefully this will produce better results than with the 6-8th graders.

If the kids seem to like the aboriginal art then we will do this project
although I don't think they have the patience to do this project yet.


6-8th: are all over the place getting their scratch boards done. We have had kids gone for entire week at a time sick. Others rushed through (6th grade) while some 8th graders are taking a really long time getting supper detailed

We have been making some fabric and glue fall batiks that have turned out really well. I have the kids practicing for their India unit batik flags. I also want the kids to make ATC using the accordion book that we used for our first project. I want the kids to make little storage books like in this picture.


So we are going to make this collection book and then today we made the textured paper from this project


each student will be assigned a type of leaf or the acorn and will make 5 cards. One they will keep and then the other four they will trade away so that they have five different leaves for their collection book. On the cover we will paint a tree in Klimt style.

My 6th grade students seemed excited about the card trading idea. My 8th grade students (I only have one 7th grader per class...go figure) are not so thrilled about having to give away their "good" art and take the 6th graders "baby art" (direct quote from one kid). It is rude but she had a point. I have some 8th graders that have taken art with me full time, everyday for almost two years now. Their work is far far superior to the work of the 6th graders that are coming to art for the first time. The music teacher and I both teach two sections of 6-8th grade electives. We keep pushing to have a beginning and an advanced level class each term. We will see if it happen.

PS. the school secretary STILL has not put in my supply order from the start of the year. We are totally out of supplies. I'm begging her to do it but she says she is too busy and will get to it when she gets to it.

kinder art up-date (aka: Mice teach us about art)

I realized I use a lot of books staring mice to teach us art...mice must be good artist

So this is what Kinder has been up too
K:
Week 1: Book- In a Painting, practice sitting in a row, practice going to table, get to free draw and practice sharing crayons

Week 2: Book- Harold and the Purple Crayon Draw yourself with gray marker and use a purple crayon to draw things that you like around you (self portrait)


Week 3: Book: Matthew's Dream Stained glass/abstracted fish coloring inside shapes with markers, using a variety of color, covering the paper with color. (abstract)


THIS WEEK Week 4: Tracing/drawing circles practice sheet, Cut out our fish, glue to blue paper, draw bubbles, tear or cut green paper to make seaweed and glue on. (collage)

NEXT WEEK Week 5: Book: Mouse Shapes primary color shape collage (3-D shapes for 1st and life skills, some free collage if there is time or next week (collage, primary colors, overlap)

Week 6: Book: Have You Seen Trees? Fall leaf crown (cutting, gluing, warm colors)

Week 7: Book: something pumpkin related. Bleeding tissue paper with die cut leaf or pumpkin on top (use of a paint brush and water )

Week 8: Book: Lines that Wiggle. After reading the book have students practice drawing different lines (remember a line is just a dot that went for a walk). After they have done some practice drawing hand out sheets of paper that have very light vertical lines printed on it. Have kids go over the lines with oil pastel (this works better than crayon). Then in each section have students make different types of lines. Finally brush very watered down tempra paint over the sections. Only offer one color at a time in a lidded cup.


Week 9 and 10: Book: Mouse Paint. Paint in 3 mice in red, yellow and blue. Next week, very very controlled mixing of secondary colors to paint mice secondary colors.


(printmaking)

Week 11 and 12: Book- Owl Moon slab clay owl (clay, texture, slip and score, slab)
or this
read and make one week and paint the next week

Week 13: chance to try printmaking using potato prints. Do this on white tissue paper to make into "stained glass windows" later on


extra cute projects that I'd like to do

art room #8 first week kinder and 1st projects

When looking at Teach Kids Art for classroom rule ideas I saw she is using two books I was planing to using to start off the year and then one more brilliant idea. So here I go borrowing flat out again.

As I mentioned I want to do a self portraiture to start the year. I think I will do this with both K and 1st and then laminate them and make the the front of the kids art portfolio which I hope to turn into art books this year. But, gosh, kindergarten just finished the year with self portraiture. Oh well they have short memories. To shake it up and incorporate a story I am going to barrow the idea of reading Henry and the Purple Crayon and then have the kids draw themselves in black and things they like in purple. Here is the sample from Teach Kids Art

1. Using a black ("F") Sharpie, draw your self-portrait vertically on your portfolio. (You may want to demonstrate drawing a large circle about 1/4th of the way down from the top, so that students don't start their drawings too small.) Add lots of details! (We always do another self-portrait at the end of the year.... it's so fun to compare them and see the growth!)

2. Now use a purple crayon to draw pictures all around you of the things you want to learn about in Kindergarten.... letters, numbers, bugs and flowers, anything you can think of! Don't forget to draw a purple crayon in your hand!



Then she has a great idea for using the book The Dot which I wanted to read to encourage the kids to relax and not worry about things looking "right" here is her The Dot sample



My only worry with the dot is the kids mixing all the colors into a brown much. We will have to work on remembering to clean our brush between colors.

I think these dots if they turn out right will look amazing framed so this will make a great second project . I don't know if the kinder's will be ready to do this one the second week. Wait...kinder doesn't come back for an extra week. Ok this is good. I will start both kinder and first with the Harold project (1st will do it a week before kinder) and then the week that kinder is doing the Purple Crayon then 1st can be doing The Dot. I also think this would be a good one for those crazy second graders also till I know I can control them this year. I still want to use the book
ISH by the same man as THE Dot. I can do that with Kinder their second week and draw ISH animals or something.

art room # 6 First week of class projects- take two

I've been thinking about it and am realizing doing a hand print color wheel the first week or two back is bound to lead to disaster with a lot of my classes. There is no reason to have paint out for the first week or two. So I have rethought my first projects and borrowed from Deep Space Sparkle and Art Projects for kids.

Kinder- sticking with self portraits and reading "Ish".

1st- Fly into a new school year birds from this lesson : http://deepspacesparkle.blogspot.com/2009/03/bird-drawing-and-painting-lesson-for.html


2nd- Lord, I don't know what to expect for this one. Overall the 1st graders last year were out of control and many were really, really troubled...like send that kid to counseling troubled. Getting through any project was hell on wheels. Maybe we will do the birds that the 1st graders are doing...I'm going to have to think about this one.

3rd - this is a pretty happy group. We will be making color wheel hot air balloons with theme of "Sail into Third Grade"
http://deepspacesparkle.blogspot.com/2009/03/hot-air-balloon-drawing-lesson-for.html
We will use this lesson and maybe have the kids divide the balloon part into the color wheel and use the media of their choice to color or collage each section. Only trick is each color needs to be a different media. We will see if they are up to this challenge or if I need to just let them decorate them however they want.


4th and 5th: Joan Miro Name and self portraits. I like the silly-ness of this project. It is a personalized project that doesn't require the kids to get caught up in "realism" or, "it doesn't look like me!" break downs.
We will start by looking at some of Miro's people and the way he connected his lines and used lines, dots and containted shapes (good reviwe) First we will write our name at the top of the page and Miro-it (I made it into an action) adding lines and dots and stuch till our names are disguised. Then we will do "self portraite's" Miro style following these directions.
http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/search/label/artist%20Joan%20Miro
combined with this
http://deepspacesparkle.blogspot.com/search/label/Joan%20Miro





Looking forward to "harvest" season (aka Halloween) I really want to do something with the book Owl Moon and do some owl projects. I found this owl applique the other day and am really inspired by his expressive eyes. I will create a paper quilt applique collage project based of this little guy: