Bee Keeping Beauties

All of my classes are currently making art that deals with North Carolina agriculture. Lots of people in our state keep bees and this lesson is a great way to tie art, science, social studies, and real life all into one beautiful project. 

We start with a discussion on NC Ag and bees. Then we watch this great video for kids about bees and why they are so very important: bee video. Then we finish with a demonstration of printmaking with bubble wrap and the linocut of a bee. 

   
 
On the second day of the project, we add a little color to the bees and then cut them out and glue them onto the honeycomb. 

   
 
Then we add some bright, colorful flowers around the edge to entice our bees to stay and hang out for awhile. 🙂

   
 
Done! 

A quick little artist statement about how they created the piece or why bees are so important is a great way to add a writing aspect to this 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!