Gimme some cupcakes!

Raise your hand if you love cupcakes! ✋🏼 That’d be me! I love some cupcakes and so do the kids. They will love drawing these awesome Wayne Thiebaud inspired pieces. I’ve made these with my second graders before but I enjoyed putting a fun new spin on it with the painted paper background and the black construction paper shadows. 

Step by step instructions coming soon. In the mean time, this is the awesome video I shared with my students prior to the making of the background. Thanks, Deep Space Sparkle!

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Year of the Fire Rooster

Chinese New Year is happening in a couple days and my 1st and 2nd graders celebrated with some beautiful artwork! Check it out…

Warm and Cool Skies

This was an interesting concept to teach my 2nd graders. We looked at the color wheel. We looked at lots of examples of art that used warm or cool colors. We practiced separating the markers into different piles. We discussed why peach and pink are warm colors. We worked REALLY hard. 

This project took us three or four weeks and required lots of patience but I think at the end of it they learned to really appreciate the effort because of how great the outcome. #lifelessons

   
    
    
    
    
   

New and Improved: Pop Art Pastries!

I usually do a lesson on Wayne Thiebaud and his great diner and bakery-inspired art.  I love the clean look and the bright colors of his paintings.  This year, I found a different take on the lesson over at Artolazzi and we are going to give it a whirl.  I can’t wait to turn my bulletin boards into a cupcake display! I did do the cupcakes with one of my second grades but then decided to do a different Thiebaud project with each class.
Here’s what we’ve been working on!

Fun with Dali

My second graders love learning about Salvador Dali and looking at pictures of him and his artwork. He’s so crazy and cooky, it’s right up their alley. We also learn about blending and intermediate colors, and analogous color schemes with this crayon resist project.

You Can’t Get Too Much Love

As Dave Matthews reminds us, “you can’t get too much love” so even though some of our Valentines projects were postponed by snow days, we finished them up last week and they were definitely a bright spot in my camera roll. 🙂

These are our collaborative kinder hearts. We painted and added the mosaic pieces the first week. Then I cut all of their hearts into four parts. I gave them all one piece of their heart and three other pieces by different classmates. They put them together to make a new heart and then added wings or an arrow.

We also finished our Valentine printmaking bees. They turned out bright and buzzy!

And last but not least, here are a couple of the third grade Pop Art hearts we made with printmaking and oil pastels.

North Carolina Honey Bees

Some of my classes are participating in the NC Farm to School calendar contest. Second graders are learning about printmaking with this project and we are making honeycombs and bees. We started off with making the honeycomb with yellow paint, bubble wrap, and brown paper. Then we printed a big bee that I had made out of cardboard. We printed with black paint and next week we use oil pastels to go back and add some color. I think the oil pastels really make the bee pop and bring it to life with the extra colors.

We also did aValentine version!

Rudolph’s Crazy Cousin

Meet Randy, Rudy’s crazy cousin. It’s okay – we all have them.
This is another great art/writing activity that I found HERE!  We made our reindeer today and though I did get started on the glittered noses, we will have to wait and finish next time while we write about them.  We made the reindeer and after gluing them together, we put them on a Christmas scrapbook paper patterned square.  I am offering red glitter or black glitter for the noses.  Some of the kids started naming their reindeer as well.  Examples: Crazy Connie, Wrinkle, Icky Nicky Nacky Nook, and Harris. Ha!  Funny stuff.  I’ll post some more pictures as we finish!

Let’s be FRANK: Picasso Rocks!

Saw this project on Art Projects for Kids and thought it would be a festive way to discuss Picasso with my second graders. They have totally loved looking at his crazy Cubist paintings and then making their own version of Cubist Frankenstein.
We drew their Frankie with sharpie and then colored it all in, including some spooky things in the background. The original plan was to look trough magazines for the eyes but it was near impossible to find eyes big enough to go on the monsters. I ended up doing a google search for “eye” and just printing the results. It worked out well.
Check out some of our finished pieces!

Starry Night in the Pumpkin Patch

I tried something new with second grade this year when we talked about Van Gogh and Starry Night. Instead of adding the little town, we added some pumpkins. We also discussed overlapping and space while drawing our pumpkins.