Something’s Fishy About This…

I have kind of (really) gotten on a fish kick with some of my classes. My Kinders, 2nd, and 3rd graders have all been working on fish projects. With K and 2, we talked about Henri Matisse and his beautiful fishbowl paintings. And with 3rd Grade, we looked at pictures of koi fish and discussed the story of the koi in the waterfall and how they are symbols for strength and perseverance. I love how fantastic they all are turning out. 

Kindergarten (we read Henri’s Scissors with this!) 

Second grade:

*thanks to Whitney Elementary on Artsonia for the example we used! 

Third Grade:

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Rainbow Tweet!

Kinders are going to be learning colors and color order next week. I saw a picture on Pinterest for this idea but the link doesn’t lead to a lesson or the picture for it – at least not anymore. Shout out to the creator! 

I think this is a great way to introduce some painting skills to those babies who haven’t ever held a paintbrush and work on rainbow order/color wheel at the same time. I’ll post results next week! 😎

Here are a few results! I love them. 😍

Happy New Year!

Wow, it’s been a long time and I feel terrible about that.  I’ve gotten quite a few new followers since my last post and y’all are probably wondering why in the world you bothered.  Well, the holidays were rather busy – busier than normal – and I got a new phone and haven’t had access to my old photos that I took of my holiday art and boards.  I think I did share some on Instagram before I got my new phone so if you are an Insta-user, check out tinyartroom there.

So, right before our Winter break, I started all my classes on their Art to Remember projects.  A few grades finished and a few are finishing this week.  All of the projects are turning out great and I have two new Art to Remember projects that I’m trying out this year.

Kindergarten was one of the classes that finished before the break so I was looking around on Pinterest and my favorite art blogs (see the blogroll to the right) to see what I could find for them that would ease us back into the swing of things.  For some of these kids (and me) I feel like it’s a second First Day of school so we need to tiptoe back into it.

I found this awesome project over at this cute little French art blog called Le Petites Têtes de L’Art which Google translated to “Small Heads of Art” so… let’s just stick to stumbling over the French pronunciation.  Anyway – the kids loved making this so much.  At the end of class, I asked them what they liked so much about it.  They all said some version of  “I liked the scribbling” and “I like cutting the paper.” So, basically they liked being given a goal but allowed to go about achieving it how they wanted.  Ahhhh… choice based art.  I promised them we would do more of this.  🙂

For now, check out the results of today’s work:

   
   
   
    
   
 

Picasso, Primativism, Paint, and Pastels

I saw this project on A Glimmer of Light and decided it would be a fun project to do with my 5th graders. They get so caught up in making things realistic and perfect, this project encourages them to do just the opposite and let the funky chicken out. And while we were working on these, I remembered another chicken project I have done with Kindergarten and thought it would be a great time to review color-mixing with them and then hang the Kinders’ and the 5th grader’s work together!

First the 5th grade work:

Are these not hilarious?! I love them and the kids loved them too.

Here are some kinder-chickens.

  
And here is the final bulletin board with bothe grade’s artwork!

A Bit Prickly…

Kindergarten learned about texture while creating these beautiful, bright, and colorful cacti. I found this lesson at Jamestown Elementary who created them with her 5th graders but I thought my Kinders would really appreciate this project as well. They did a great job, really.

We started with a directed drawing of the pot and the cacti and then reviewed patterns and filled in our pots with different designs. We colored the actual cactus with regular crayons and then used payons (watercolor crayons) to color the background. The last day was spent painting over the background with water.

Check ’em out!

          

Here I am checking out the cactus garden room at the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC this weekend! I thought of my Kinders as soon as I saw them. 

  

Here’s some more colorful cacti! I love them all!

  

Art to Remember

Kinders started working on their Art to Remember projects last week and today they added their finishing touches – their fingerprints!
In the years that I have been doing this fundraiser, I haven’t found a project for kindergarten that I really love for AtR but this might be a winner.
The objectives that we cover are:
-following directions
-tracing
-drawing lines
-coloring completely what we have drawn
-finger painting

Aztec Sun Stones

Kinders haves started making some awesome sun stones inspired by the large monolithic sculpture found in Mexico City. They loved drawing the silly face of the sun and getting to paint him bright yellow. I can’t wait to see their finished products. In the mean time, here’s how we will put them together.

Here are some of our cute sun faces so far. Overflowing with personality, as usual!

Ready for Spring!

Kinders started working on some Spring-inspired pictures this week. We looked at some of Henri Rousseau’s artwork and lots of pictures of beautiful flowers. We also discussed our favorite bugs/spiders/snakes. We talked about how to completely fill our paper with objects, even if that meant that some of the object wouldn’t be seen. This week we are drawing the plants and flowers. Next week we will add the magnifying glass with our favorite bug. We used construction paper crayons for this project, with some help from regular crayons inside the magnifying glass.

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.

Chinese New Year Art

2014 is the Year of the Horse and the Chinese will be celebrating on January 31st.  Several of my classes will be creating Chinese New Year inspired art over the next couple of weeks.  I’ll post some examples of their projects here.  I have step-by-step photos for some of the projects as well.

Kinders will be creating some simple dragon puppets and working on fine motors skills and cutting some pretty intricate lines.  They will also be using the accordion fold to make the torso of their dragon.

First graders are also making dragons but they are making their own heads and creating the body out of a paper chain.

With Third Graders, after discussing Chinese New Year traditions vs. American New Year traditions, I give them a piece of paper and we draw dragons but they don’t know that they are drawing dragons at first.  I just give them instructions to draw a triangle at the top of the paper, then draw a triangle at the bottom.  Connect the two triangles with a curvy line.  After we draw in the details of the head they will guess what we are drawing and then I can show them my finished example.  We discuss pattern and they have to create the body using only lines, shapes, and colors in a pattern symmetrically on each side of the center line of the dragons body.  They can add wings and a background as well.  I was really pleased to see some of them using other objects we had discussed, like the red lanterns.

 

Second graders will be doing some paper lantern art, found on Pinterest, but it only leads to a picture.  Let me know who I can give credit, if you know!

And fourth grade will be making some Chinese scroll paintings in the next couple of weeks.

Looking forward to seeing all of these awesome projects hung together!