Kindergarten: AlmaThomas Hearts

Alma Thomas created these very large and colorful paintings that look as if they could be mosaics. When I ask kids how they think they are made, they often guess pieces of paper. Although they are actually paintings, we create our on mosaic version, using little pieces of ripped paper. This year, instead of making circles, we made hearts shapes in honor of Valentines Day coming up.

1st Grade: Starry Night Collaborative

The entire first grade worked together to create this "Starry Night" inspired work of art. We looked at the incredible work of Vincent Van Gogh, discussing the colors and "movement" that we found in the painting. Each student was assigned a square from the "Starry Night" painting to replicate as best they can. We used the colors that Van Gogh used, and tried creating all the tiny brush strokes that he created. Our pieces all put together looked a bit more abstract than Vang Gogh's bur still carried the movement and beautiful colors of the night sky. We hung our masterpiece in the hall way for people to guess which famous painting/artist inspired this.

Kindergarten: Wayne Thiebaud Gumball Machines

Wayne Thiebaud was our artist inspiration for this project. We looked at his paintings of candy, ice cream and cakes. Which first made us very hungry, but then we got to work creating our own gumball machines. This gave us lots of practice drawing our circles!

4th Grade: Snowmen at Night

Fourth Grade Learned how to shade. Fourth grade and I talked about the way light would hit snowmen at night, casting a shadow to one side. We used a dark blue as our darkest shade, the medium blue of the paper as our medium tone, and white as our highlight.

7th Grade: Mondrian Map Paintings

These paintings are Mondrian inspired, map, analogous color, abstract paintings. Wow that's a mouth full! 7th grade and I discussed a lot of terms for this project. First we looked at the art of Piet Mondrian and discussed where he found his inspiration for his abstract paintings.



After this we took a look at some art that was inspired by maps and discussed how it looks similar to the work of Mondrian. Next we took a look at analogous colors on the color wheel, meaning three colors next to each other on the color wheel.


Students chose a map of anything and anywhere they would like. Some chose cities, some chose maps from video games, some chose amusement park maps. We had a nice variety of maps, shapes and lines. Students were to use their analogous colors to first paint their map. After painting the map with the analogous colors, they were able to steer away from the map to add additions that would map their painting more successful.

6th Grade: Monochromatic Mandalas

A mandala is a radial design, representing life. It is often used for meditation purposes found in the Hindu or Buddhist religion. Students designed their own Mandala, using rulers and compasses to start the radial design. Monochromatic means one color. Students were also challenged to paint to mandalas using one color, mixing their own tints and shades. Students learned a tint of a color means to add white and a shade of a color means to add black.

Kindergarten: Baby Jesus in the Manger