Hurry, Hurry, Back to School Night

Always feel pressured to have artwork up for back to school night. Sometimes this can be a challenge, depending on what we are working on in the art room.  The elementary school has btosn the second full week of school. Thought I would share my current bulletin boards, especially after being featured on Bulletin Board Ideas. The Picasso's are from the 2nd graders. First time I have done this project with younger kids. They enjoyed this. Think next year may lay some ground rules for the painting process.

We started with shape in all of the grades. In kindergarten we looked at Piet Mondrian. Using shape sponges we created our shapes and outlined with black paint.

One more back to school night this Thursday for middle school. Always glad when these are over. Love seeing all the parents but it is exhausting.

2nd Grade Owls

2nd graders spent the first class learning about owls and looking at pictures of them.  They drew owls on tagboard with pencil and outlined them with permanent markers.

In our second class students used paint, yarn and feathers to add color and texture to their owls.  They created a background on black construction paper using oil pastels and glued their owls down. I love how each one is different and reflects a bit of the child!

2nd Grade Autumn Leaf

First off, I'm back, I think....every time I think I have everything under control and scheduled something gets pushed off the edge.  So, I'm sorry I've been absent so long but I am going to try to post twice a week during the school year.
This project isn't difficult but makes a nice presentation.  I enlarged an oak leaf and had my students paint them with warm colors after drawing the veins of the leaf with crayons. The following week they cut them out and glued them to construction paper that I had hole punched.  Using yarn they "sewed" a border.  Happy to have my first fall project photographed and ready to hang in the halls.

The Blues

This project is from February for Black History Month.  I feel like I never get caught up with everything.  Anyway, for this project I play some blues music and have the 2nd graders identify the instruments.  We talk about the beat and what feelings we get from this type of music.  We than talk about how many different blue colors there are.  Students realize there are infinite possibilities.  They divide there paper up into squares/rectangles and are given watercolor paints to make as many blues as they can.  This becomes the background for our pictures.  I have templates they can choose from to use for their foreground which they trace, color and cut out.  The following week we put these on with 3-DO's.  While they are creating I read the book A Blue So Blue, by Jean Francois Dumont.  Has beautiful illustrations and a cute storyline.  

Camouflage

2nd graders study animal habitats and one of the things they learn about animals is how many of them are camouflaged.  So in Art students learned how to draw a lizard, colored it with oil pastels and cut it out.   Using watercolors they created a background that the lizards would be camouflaged on and glued them down.  

After School Drawing Class

Just did an after school drawing class for Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade and this is some of the work.  We met for an hour for three sessions.  We did all of our drawing from real items.  When they came into the room we would start with a large still life drawing.  We would than have a lesson on shading, shadow or line weight and than spend time on mini-drawings with different items each week.  I think their favorites were the beanie babies and plastic dinosaurs.   

 

2nd Grade Kente Cloth

In January I start art projects for Black History Month.  Today my 2nd graders were introduced to kente cloth from Ghana.  After viewing some of the cloth, they created their own with oil pastels and construction paper.  We talked about the importance of color and pattern in our designs.

Piet Mondrian

All students in the elementary school are studying Piet Mondrian.  For the lower grades we looked at Mondrian's later work.  We talked about what we saw in his artwork- line, shape and color.  The following pics are from our first projects for grades k-2.

These pieces are from kindergarten.  Students were given square and rectangle sponges to use in the primary colors and black paint to create line with a paint brush.

This project was done by my 1st graders.  This project is from Teach Kids Art.

These are from my 2nd graders.  The glue wasn't dry yet, hence the spots.  Students used black construction paper with "foamy" sheets that I cut into different sizes.  They were instructed to make abstract art and to leave spaces between the pieces.  

I will have Mondrian trees from the 3rd and 4th graders soon.