Snowmen at Night

Fifth Graders read the book Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner. We created snowmen that were having fun hanging around at night time. Some of my classes created snowmen with chalk pastels. Other classes used white tempera paint and oil pastels to create shadows and highlights. We talked about the moon and lamp post being light sources and creating highlights and shadows on our snowmen. It was really great to see the students create all their silly snowmen. Some even had snowmen with gold necklaces and boom boxes to represent a rapping snowman. This was a great lesson to incorporate the spirit of the holiday season while also learning valuable blending and shadow techniques.

Van Gogh Landscape Collages

By far my favorite Van Gogh painting is his Wheat Field with Cypresses. I decided what better inspiration for a 5th grade project. We talked about the movements of impressionism, post-impressionism, and expressionism. We discussed how Van Gogh's work spanned these movements and became world renowned. As a class we read a little bio about Van Gogh that I found here. I also showed the students a small Prezi presentation that can be found here. We discussed textures, impasto painting, and Van Gogh's new approach to applying paint. We used chalk pastels dipped in tempera paint to create our initial painted papers. I got the inspiration for this part of the lesson from a lesson I saw on Deep Space Sparkle a while back. We learned the word impasto or texture painting, we tried to create lots of textures on our painted papers. After that we created layers of paper to make a landscape collage. We finished them off by adding details with oil pastels. I am so impressed with how these turned out. During this project my husband and I had the opportunity to go to NY for a long weekend and see the actual painting by Van Gogh. I showed it all to the kids and zoomed in on the details.They were so fascinated by the real textures. For the full lesson plan Click Here

Glue Line Pastel Leaves

To start off the fall season I decided to do a forest floor themed lesson. 6th graders created contour line drawings of leaves and then outlined them with glue. We then went back in and blended them together. We went over a little bit of color theory to ensure that students didn't mix complementary colors together and end up with all brown leaves. I was really pleased with how they turned out. When they were finished I sprayed them with workable fixative and hung them in the hall to create a festive fall display. My full lesson plan can be found here.

Glue Line Watercolor Pumpkins

This is another lesson I have seen floating around on some other blogs. It is a pretty basic contour line drawing of a pumpkin. I had pumpkins on the middle of each table for students to observe. Buying eight pumpkins and getting them into school wasn't an easy feet for little me, and I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with them when I was done. Nonetheless we used them to discuss what an observation drawing is. After adding our glue we used watercolor with a wet on wet technique. I had students add lots of water to the paper first so that their colors would run and bleed together. At the very end we went around all our glue lines with a fine point sharpie marker to make them pop! My full lesson can be found here. I ended up taking all the pumpkins I bought to a pumpkin carving party!

Fauvist Inspried Still Life

This project was inspired by Henri Matisse and his fauvist style of painting. We discussed using expressive brushstrokes and colors to create a truly unique piece of artwork. We talked about perspective to create the look of a table moving back in space. We also discussed what a collage is and how Matisse was not only known for paintings, but also a world famous collage artist. I had students collect fruit stickers to add an element of realism to their bowl of fruit. We finished them off by using gold wrapping paper and black sharpie to create a fancy frame. For the full lesson click here.

Thanksgiving Quilt Project

A handful of 5th grade students see me for an extra art class
every week. If a student is not enrolled in band or choir then they will have a specials class during that time. I consider these my students that I can really polish and make shine! A lot of them may be in my class because they lack the motivation to be in band or choir, which means I have to work extra hard to find things that motivate and interest them. This project was one that really got them excited! We created a thanksgiving quilt out of watercolor paintings, construction paper, and oil pastels. I started this assignment by doing a small presentation on what a symbol is. We discussed universal symbols for certain holidays. We went around the room naming some symbols that might represent Thanksgiving. We talked about the significance of a symbol withstanding hundreds of Thanksgivings and making it to present day. I brought in several things I thought might represent Thanksgiving, such as, pumpkins, gourds, indian corn, leaves, etc. We then did contour line drawings of our symbols on 8x8 inch paper. Some students drew from the objects I brought in, others had me search images of pies and turkeys and I had them on the Smart Board as references.
The next class we added oil pastels overtop of our pencil drawings and then did a watercolor resist. When our paintings were dry we glued them to a 12 by 12 sheet of construction paper. I had about 4 colors for the kids to choose from. They hole punched around the edges and then did either a straight stitch or a whip stitch to finish the edges. The very last step was to take a gold metallic marker (I used Prang Metallics) and write what you were thankful for around the construction paper border. I created a large quilt square for the center and used scrap booking paper to create smaller patchworking squares around it. This took about four 35 minute classes to complete.

Op Art

This project seems to be a new artroom staple. I have seen it everywhere on the web. I did this once during student teaching and the kids really seemed proud to create an illusion so I decided it would be a good intro lesson for the beginning of the year. My fifth graders created these optical illusions using colored pencils, markers, and complementary color schemes. They were allowed to pick two pairs of color to alternate between each cone, but the only stipulation was that the two colors had to be complements. For example if you pick a purple marker you have to use a yellow colored pencil. This gave the lesson another element of learning, and the kids haven't forgotten their complementary colors all year. To start out I did a power point presentation on Bridget Riley and Julian Beever. We discussed the difference between Bridget Riley's Op Art work and Julian Beever's illusions. While students might call both optical illusions Riley's are really the true works of Op Art. I was so impressed with how much information they retained from this lesson. It was a great way to get the year started and all the Op Art vocabulary and artist discussions made for some big Glad Cash pay outs!!