Amazing Amazon Blue Morpho Butterflies

Georgetown first grade artists know lots of cool facts about South America’s Amazon rain forest!  Did you know it rains an inch every day in the Amazon rain forest?  And that the trees grow very, very tall and an amazing number of different creatures inhabit the rain forest – including beautiful Blue Morpho Butterflies!

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Fresh From the Art Room….

We are finishing up some great projects in our art room!  Fourth graders have been revisiting a favorite artist, Faith Ringgold – and have created these beautiful self-portraits.  My favorite part of this project is reading what they wrote about themselves below their portraits – such a fun way for me to get to know them all a little bit better!  (click on the images to see what they wrote!)

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First graders have completed a little pattern project – Beetle Bop Bugs.  This project gave them a chance to show Mrs. Brouwer their direction following and cutting skills…not to mention getting to use those fancy paper punches!  First graders learned that the paper punch can be a little tricky to use!

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Second grade artists have been looking at the sunflowers painted by Vincent Van Gogh as they created their own beautiful sunflowers.

 

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IMG_0019  We love these new Crayola crayons…so many beautiful colors all rolled in to one fancy twistee crayon.

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Parents….the 1st grade Beetle Bop project and the 2nd grade Sunflowers are in Georgetown’s ARTSONIA on-line art gallery – visit the gallery HERE.

Precious Portraits With Pendants

Have I mentioned before that I adore my first grade artists?  Check out their stunning self portraits and beautiful clay pendants!

The project began with the creation of our clay pendants – my first grader’s  very first clay project!  After some time rolling and smooshing the clay, we smashed it into a nice clay cookie and added texture with bottle caps and sticks.  After oohing and aahing at their finished glazed pendants, they spent lots of time lining up their beads in different patterns before stringing them.

  

Next came the portraits – we viewed self-portraits by famous artists, and there was lots of giggling as we looked in our mirrors and drew our faces.  First graders smiled into their mirrors and noticed how lines showed up around their mouths, noticed that their eyebrows were made up of little hairs, and that their ears were in line with their eyes.

Their finished portraits are so cute – and many of them captured a good likeness of themselves!

 

    

This project was inspired by a Summer 2010 article from Arts And Activities Magazine – “Jewelry Portraits” by Aimee Fresia.

 

 

 

The Button Project

Georgetown artists in grades 1-3 began their first project of the school year with a fun little line, shape, and color review – The Button Project.  Their designs began with a button or fuzzy pom-pom of their choice; they then created a radial design using lines and shapes around their buttons and pom-poms.  Check out their fabulous designs!

      

The button project was inspired by a project from the blog Fine Lines – see it here. 

Shhh…Mother’s Day is this Sunday!

My first grade artists are finishing up a special Mother’s Day project.  They are so excited to sneak their artwork home and hide it until May 13th!

We began by looking at the art of the great American artist Norman Rockwell, learning that Rockwell often told a humorous story through his art. First Graders created a little story about their Moms as they illustrated their newspaper, tying in to Rockwell’s ilustrations for the Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell – The Runaway

During the next class we created our flowers for Mom – beautiful lilac paintings that were carefully painted with just one little finger dipped in purple paint.  And finally – a beautiful name tag and ribbon wrap-up.  Happy Mother’s Day, lucky Georgetown moms of first graders!

   

 

First Grade Bats

First Grade artists created these cute little bats this week.  I found out that first graders know lots of cool bat facts; bats sleep upside down, they eat mosquitoes, and they sleep all day so they can stay up all night!  We read a sweet little bat story while working on this project – Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Baby Bat’s Lullaby.  A little brown crayon, some purple watercolor – and, beautiful baby bats.

First Graders Explore Picasso

First Grade artists have been learning about Pablo Picasso and cubism.  We found many shapes and colors in Picasso’s “Three Musicians” painting – and everyone enjoyed finding the dog hidden with the musicians!

Three Musicans by Pablo Picasso

We created our own versions of the Three Musicians, adding texture to our background and lots of colorful shapes.

First Grade Mummies – Finished!

First grade finished up their cool mummy paintings that they began last week by adding Egyptian hieroglyphs on the picture border.  I gave them a reference sheet that showed our alphabet and a hieroglyph alphabet – they were fascinated with the pictures and excited to write their name in hieroglyph form.  And best of all was choosing a special shiny jewel to glue on their Egyptian mummy portraits!

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