Mixed Media Cubist Animals

For this assignment sixth graders learned about the life and work of Pablo Picasso. We discussed his cubist period and the impact it had on the art world. Students used oil pastels, water pastels, and colored pencils to create cubist works of art. We started this lesson by reading a one page biography on Picasso's life that I found here. We then looked at a presentation exhibiting some of Picasso's cubist work and analyzed the characteristics they possessed. You can find my presentation on my Prezi page here.
The kids showed some great craftsmanship on this assignment. We shaded with our colored pencils to create some depth in the work, which became a little time consuming. For the oil pastel and water pastel we colored in fully. After we had filled in every shape we went back around them with black colored pencil to create outlines. The full lesson can be found here.

My First Post

Hi! I am new to running a blog so hopefully I can grow and learn from my colleagues in the Art Ed. blogging world. I have been looking at blogs for the past two years to get ideas throughout student teaching and my first year, and I finally decided it was time to pay it forward. A lot of my projects come from adaptations of other ideas I have seen. I will try to give credit whenever I can find or remember the source. I kept meaning to do this throughout the school year and just never found time. So here it is finally! All the work up to February for the 2011-2012. It might be jumbled up because I am not sure how to change the order of my posts just yet. Here are some pictures of my little art room. The Dear Students sign I saw on Pinterest.
















I have seen a couple different ideas on how to keep kids motivated in the art room. It's always a little bit harder with middle schoolers to keep work ethics up. Some days they seem really excited and engaged, and then the next week they come in and look at you like this is the worst project ever!! To keep that from happening I incorporated a classroom management strategy that one of my amazing mentor teachers taught me. I basically have a class bank going where students try to earn money towards their class total. Its called GLAD CASH. You can earn Glad Cash for answering a question during discussion, working hard, or being a good Samaritan in the art room. I collect all the Glad Cash at the end of the class time and we add it to the class total. At the end of every semester the 5th and 6th grade class with the highest score gets to have an edible art party! The kids love it!! They totally police each other to earn more cash!!

I also give out the cleanest table award at the end of each class. If a table is chosen then each of its members gets to fill out a raffle ticket and enter it into the cleanest table drawing at the end of the week. I choose 3 names every Friday and have them posted on my board for students to see the next week. The students love it! They can either choose a prize from my artist of the day prize bin, or they can add two pieces of Glad Cash to the class total.
I will definitely post more soon about the happenings in my little art room...

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.