Fourth grade artists have been exploring the abstract work of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. They loved watching this short video, “The Kandinsky Effect”. They kept saying… play it again, play it again! Inspired by Kandinsky’s “Several Circles” piece, fourth graders printed circles with black tempera paint and colored their circles with oil pastel. We [...]
Continue Reading Add comment October 11, 2012
First graders have been learning about architecture. We looked at lots of interesting buildings and talked about why homes in other parts of the world look different. My smart first graders figured out that the available building materials can determine how the architecture looks, such as igloos in cold northern countries and structures made of [...]
Continue Reading 1 comment May 3, 2012
First Grade artists have been working on a fun little snowman project. Last week we drew our skinny snowmen with tall hats and painted the background – reviewing our warm and cool colors of course! This week we read a favorite snowman book – Beuhner’s “Snowmen at Night”; colored some great patterns on our scarves [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 12, 2012
Second grade artists have started to explore the art of the Middle East – our cultural focus area for this school year. After examining Mrs. Brouwer’s carpet from Saudia Arabia, they created their own carpets by printing with tempera paint. Mrs. Brouwer’s carpet from Saudi Arabia. First graders were amazed at how heavy this carpet [...]
Continue Reading Add comment November 11, 2011
A few weeks ago, I realized that I had not given my 4th grade artists a chance to work “really big” this year – probably because my 4th grade groups are so large – 30 kids is a bunch of artists to “go big”! So we began the Big Fish project – a review of [...]
Continue Reading 6 comments May 29, 2011
My kinders have been working on two projects during the month of May. We reviewed pattern as we created these cool caterpillars. We also reviewed shapes as we created these people by printing with bottle caps and other gadgets – and then colored our people with crayons.
Continue Reading Add comment May 23, 2011
As a final wrap up to our African Cultural study, my third graders created these sweet little zebras. We talked about why zebras are so beautifully marked (so predators can’t focus on an individual zebra to hunt in the herd) and looked at zebra patterns. We drew our zebras on 9×12 tagboard, breaking them down [...]
Continue Reading Add comment March 17, 2011
Second Grade artists have been enjoying our Grinch project. We drew them with Sharpie markers and added grinch green color to his face, using our understanding of shading and value that we developed this fall with our pumpkin project. They also drew a fancy border around Mr. Grinch and made it smaller than his head [...]
Continue Reading Add comment December 6, 2010
