A few more art projects

                             

School is out as of today! I couldn't tell which were happier, the students or the teachers. This I know: in one week, the kids will be bored and ready to go back to school. The teachers won't get bored, but by August, we will all be ready to go back to school.

After today, I don't plan on showing any more student art work until I return to my classroom at the end of summer break. So, to carry you over, here are a few more projects we worked on this year.

First graders painted a beach ball scene over four 30 minute sessions: first, they colored the beach ball, blanket, and umbrella with crayons, learning about the color spectrum. Then they cut them out. Next, they painted the sky and the ocean with blue watercolor on tag paper (12"X18"). That had to dry before they could glue on the ball, blanket, and umbrella. Third session, glued those parts on, and a popsicle stick for the umbrella handle, and drew/colored in a bucket freehand. Finally, they added glue and sand.

Clean, store bought sand, not the kind you find in a kid's sand box that the cat has been digging around in!

                                   

The modeling clay objects were done last week when one group of second graders came to me for their last class. I gave them a choice: modeling clay or free draw.

The one above is a snail, the one below is a boy listening to the music on his headphones. One girl made a series of happy faces, one of which I placed at the opening of this entry.

                                                          

Fourth graders have been working for a couple of months on their Cherokee clan masks, which aren't really functioning masks, but represent the seven clans of the Cherokee Nation.    

Here you can see Wolf, Deer, and Bird clans being made. The students really enjoyed this project, but I think the part they found to be most tedious was the covering their foil sculpture with tape. They couldn't wait to get to the painting part, though.

                                                                    

 Kindergarteners continued to surprise me with their newly acquired skills this year. These babies have not been students in the classroom for very long, but how quickly they have picked up everything we have taught them.

Here they are painting an undersea scene. A few weeks ago, their classroom teachers read them stories about life under the sea, so I found a lesson plan (yeah, I don't write all my own lessons,... I do borrow ideas from others all the time) for this terrific underwater painting. I wanted them to learn how to make darker and lighter colors.

In their first session, they learned how to make dark blue by adding black to blue, then they made light blue by adding white to blue. So fascinating for them. So we made the sea, with the dark blues on the bottom of their ocean, and the lighter blues at the top. They used a sponge to apply the tempera paints. Then we put them on the air-dry rack.

                                                

 In the second session, they drew the fish and plants with oil pastels, following my demonstrations of jellyfish, starfish, sea horses, sea turtle, fish, etc... Then, I told them to draw whatever kind of sea life they wanted. Since they'd recently heard stories about sea life in their classrooms, and seen lots of pictures of animals and plants in the sea, they had no trouble thinking of what to draw.

I gave the instruction to have the paper laying on their table so the long end went up and down, and most followed this, but little girl took off on her own and made a horizontal painting. It looked so good, I forgave her!

                                     

Third graders who had studied about Australia made boomerangs earlier in the year, but I don't remember if I posted anything about them. I hung them on the wall outside of the 3rd grade classroom, and two students had their bodies traced on black paper for the silhouette of a girl and a boy tossing the boomerangs.

                                                        

Although, these did not fly, we did make boomerangs a couple of weeks ago that could fly. We had to wait through three weeks of windy and wet weather before the kids could go out and practice throwing their little boomerangs. That was yesterday! It was 95 degrees outside, but we were out there throwing and catching the boomerangs.

Those other pictures you see in and around the boomerangs on the wall are the Dreamtime paintings they had done in oil pastel and watercolor on brown paper.

 

While the one class studied about Australia, another 3rd grade class studied about Africa. Specifically, Kenya. Here are some of the Facial Mystique 'masks' they made. Again, not really functional masks, but they were trying to create a face from their photograph that would represent their personality, or say something about themselves.

These I refer to as the Three Warriors.

                                     

After they completed their masks, they had to write a paragraph about why they chose some of the elements, and what they were trying to achieve in the design. I couldn't include that part in the photos because it included their names. The set below I call the Three Princesses.

                         

One of the fifth grade teachers called me to her classroom on Friday last week. As soon as I had a minute, I ran over to see what she wanted. In front of all her students, she gave me this award.

                                    

Now I'm not making a fuss over this, because we're all of us doing the work we want to do, that we're trained to do, even love to do ... but that she made such a fuss is typical of this teacher. She is role modeling for her students every day that we should recognize the good in others, and that kind words should be shared every day. Encouragement and support is a given in her classroom. Students have each other's back. They are a team. "One Team One Heart" is the slogan for the entire fifth grade at this school.

I've truly enjoyed teaching all of them this year... all the fifth graders... all the grade levels, actually. It's been a good year. Thank you for coming along with me and sharing this fantastic journey in my classroom.

Tags: art projects, School is out, art class

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