I recently came across the book, Kindness Grows by Britta Teckentrup and just fell in love with it. Then another art teacher posted a project of a tree inspired by Gustav Klimt and I decided I must bring these two things together for one of my grades. That grade is third grade and we will be creating these beautiful trees inspired by two other beautiful trees!
So the last two or three weeks of school were really REALLY busy. Testing, awards days, field trips, etc. Some days we would have classes and some days we would not. This was one of my last projects I did with some of my first grade classes. It’s a new project and they turned out so pretty. Not even half the kids finished in the two weeks we worked on them so I would say this needs a good three classes to get completely finished.
The first class, we used We Give Books to read Tinga Tinga Tales. If you don’t know about this website, it’s awesome. Free books, online, and the organization donates real books to others. Use it!
Then we we went back and looked at all the bright illustrations, especially focusing on the chicken and her beautifully patterned feathers.
We used black paper and white crayons to draw our chickens and the farm in the background. Then we used oil pastel to color it all in and learned about layering the oil pastels and creating the patterns. They turned out so bright and pretty and each one was different. I’m sad I didn’t get to hang these up and share them with the rest of the school. I must remember to do them before the very end next year! 😄
And the happies! : ) The last couple of weeks, I have been discussing Picasso and his “periods” with the first graders. We compared and contrasted with paintings from each period and had some interesting discussions about how people used to dress and, it never failed, any time I said, “Picasso fell in love,” kids would fall out of their chairs, totally disgusted. Highly entertaining.
After we recovered from the discussions of feeling sad and then happy, we created our own Blue Period portraits and Rose Period portraits. These are some of the results!
I found this idea at Artsonia, taught by Linda Welling at Cedar Creek Elementary. She said she used chalk pastels but I chose to use oil pastels. They seem to be less messy and I didn’t want to cause any asthma attacks! We used black paper and sketched with pencils before drawing with glue. The next class period, we colored in the pumpkins, avoiding the glue. They were required to use at least three shades of orange on their pumpkins. Here is the link to her museum page at Artsonia.
I’ll add another picture when I can get more pumpkins hung up!
Love Starry Night and Vincent van Gogh and this has always been a favorite lesson of mine. We talk about how it’s all about the LINES LINES LINES in this picture. We also discuss all the colors he used and the way he depicted the wind. I’ve always used oil pastels with this project – I think they are the best medium to use with this!
tinyartroom 