2nd Grade: African Kente Cloth

February is black history month. Although we learn about other African American artists throughout the year, I think it is important to be sure I teach my students about some African culture, or important figures. For second grade, we learned about Kente cloth, which is a style of art from African Culture. We discussed reasons the cloth would be worn, how it was made, the bright colors, and geometric patterns found on the cloth. The students and I then looked at a photograph of three African women carrying baskets on their head. We discussed why the women carried baskets, to take the pressure off their backs of carrying around these heavy loads. The second graders were assigned to design three figures wearing kente clothes. We used a burlap material to make the baskets on top of the figures heads. The students painted their figures with bright colors.

5th Grade: Emoji Soft Sculptures

Pop art is a fun style of art to learn about, but kids especially love it when it's something relevant to them. For a fifth grader in today's society, they love emojis! The students were so excited to create something they were interested in. We took a look at other pop art and what types of things were popular then. This was a great way for students to also think differently about sculpture. Often times we think of sculpture as these hard surfaces such as wood, marble, steel, etc. We often over look "soft sculptures. These students made their soft sculptures using felt, hot glue, and yarn.

3rd Grade: Pablo Picasso Three Musicians

Pablo Picasso's abstract cubism painting of three musicians was the inspiration for this project.


The students use pattern cloth to cut out the shapes to make their own three different musicians. To real push the feel of music flowing through the piece, we used old music sheets as the background.

6th Grade: Positive and Negative Space

Positive space is where our object exists. The negative space is the area surrounding it. In art we can create our image through both presence of positive space, or the absence of space. In other words if we cut the shape of a circle out of paper, there is now a circle missing. We still know that the image of a circle existed because of the absence of material. This is exactly what sixth grade explored for this project. We added another element to our positive and negative space, by adding designs called "zentangles" in our positive space. these geometric designs are similar to doodles, but involve a little more pattern, and geometric shapes/designs.

Kindergarten: Hearts

These (fragile) hearts, are made a model magic. The students learned how to roll out long coils, as if they were making a snake. They then made the shape of the heart with one coil and twirled the other coils to make spirals for inside. Model magic is such a fun material for kindergarten to work with, but apparently when it dries on top of paper, the paper sucks the moisture out of it and they crack into pieces. (what a said thing to happen to the hearts!) After a bunch of gluing I was able to save almost all of the hearts. The water color paint added beautiful life back into these hearts. 

2nd Grade: Pattern Cats