Second Grade Cubist Collages

I kind of stole this idea from another blog who has super awesome projects, but second grade spent October learning about the Cubist art movement.  I had to kids do a See, Think, Wonder exercise with Pablo Picasso's collage The Three Musicians and we talked about how Cubist artists  used a lot of basic shapes in their art.  They started off their collages by choosing a background paper and I showed them ways to create different types of floors; we also talked about the kids of details we could make for inside a house.  The next time we met I brought out one of those movable skeletons (we named him Mr. Bones) that you can get at a Halloween store and we talked about how the body moves at the joints, then I showed them how to use rectangles to make their figures.  Their only rules for this project was to 1. make a person that is doing some sort of action, 2. use different colors, and 3. use LOTS of details.  They all made some pretty awesome collages, but I really like the one with the red background because the kid made a picture of an evil man eating!

 

 

First Grade "Fish Eyes" Collages

I started talking with first grade about the different types of jobs artists have.  For this project we talked about the job of an illustrator and I introduced the book Fish Eyes by Lois Ehlert.  We started off our collages by cutting out the shape of a fish and with each class I approached it a little differently.  I had some classes draw a large fish on a rectangle, others folded their rectangle in half and drew half of a fish, and a few cut off the corners to get an oval shape.  We worked on adding fins and read through Ehlert's book to get some ideas for details.  The last day of the project we talked about habitats and I showed the kids how to draw a few types of things found in the ocean.  I really liked how the kids took their own spin on adding details in the fish habitat; one kid even went as far as to make a submarine to put in the background :)

 

 

 

 

Kindergarten Fall Pumpkins

I'm definitely way behind on posting up all of my projects, especially with Kindergarten who I see twice a week for 30 minutes.  Back in October, Kindergarten started learning about the secondary colors.  They all thought it was "magical" when i showed them how the primary colors make the secondary colors.  We started off our project by creating a drawing a large pumpkin on our papers (I brought in pumpkins so they could look at the shapes) and mixed our oranges to paint them.  The next day  we mixed up our greens and purples to make the backgrounds.  Our last day was spent cutting out our pumpkins, making a nighttime scene, and making texture.

 

 

 

 

Second Grade Amazing Line Designs

Second grade started off the year by studying lines and pattern.  They had to draw a pattern of 9 lines onto a piece of construction paper and cut and glue.  I encouraged them to draw their wavy and zigzag lines a little more spread out so they weren't so cramped together, but I had some overachievers :) who made some really detailed lines that looked awesome; I felt bad when they had to cut them out.  I love them though!

 

 

 

Third and Fourth Grade Op Art

So I started off the year for third and fourth grade doing an Op Art project, which turned out quite interesting.  We talked about how line, shape and color were all important in the Op Art movement  and looked at the works of Victor Vasarely.    

Third grade started of their projects by drawing a wavy grid across their paper and filled each of those boxes with an X that stretched from corner to corner.  Then we discussed warm and cool colors and how to create pattern and repetition with color.  Students were to choose either a warm or cool color scheme and colored in their triangles with markers.  They were to choose a color for all the left triangles in every box and so on.

 

 

 

Fourth grade started out their Op Art projects using a ruler to

4th Grade studied this work by Vasarely

 create a grid then tracing some circles over their grid lines.  We discussed how to create a repeating pattern with black and white and talked about how the pattern would change every time a circle line went through one of the boxes.  We looked at Victor Vasarely's work Zebra which showed how the pattern changes.  I had some mixed results with the creating the black and white pattern stage but in the end the work was looking pretty great. Students colored in their white spaces using complementary colors, their backgrounds one color and the circles another, but I think they look better without the color.