4th Grade: Texture Sandwiches

Texture was the focus of this fun project! Our first day on this project I played a game with the students. I placed objects from around my room into a box. I called one student up at a time, and without looking at the object, or saying what the object was, they had to describe the feeling of the object to their class. The class then guessed the object based on the textures. Not an easy game!
The students goal for this project was to use all the different textures they could think of in my room and to create a wacky sandwich piled with different foods.

4th Grade: "It's A Small World After All" Group Project

You may be familiar with the Disney World ride, "It's a Small World", but did you know that some of the concept ideas for this ride were made by the artist Mary Blair. Here is one of her paintings that helped to inspire designs for this ride. 

The fourth grade students used this as inspiration for our own lesson. Each student chose a monument from around the world. The students researched their monument and created a simple drawing of it. As a group, the students of each class created a large drawing of all our monuments from around the world and combined them to create our "small world" design. The students used their research to type up a paragraph with facts about their monuments. 

Kindergarten: St. Patrick's Day Scratchboard

HAPPY ST.  PATRICK'S DAY!

St. Patrick's Day was a fun day for kindergarten, both in their classroom and in art class. On St. Patrick's day, we think of leprechauns, pots of gold, rainbows, shamrocks, horse shoes, etc. For this project the students created their very own rainbow scratch board! The first class they colored their board a rainbow using crayons. We then used mixed dish soap and black tempera paint and painted over the rainbow. The next class when they were all dry (on St. Patrick's Day) kindergarten scratched out symbols or wrote "Happy St. Patrick's Day", revealing the rainbow background. 

The painted scratch boards

3rd Grade: Ming Vases

Third grade learned about our Japanese, Ming vases. We looked at the different shapes the vases came in as well as the royal blue glaze used. We discussed what the vases are decorated with, such as dragons and flowers. After painting our vase cut outs with the royal blue paint, students glues it to a brown background and painted Japanese cherry blossoms coming out of each vase.

Kindergarten: Alma Thomas Paper Collages

February is black history month, so what a great time to highlight some of our African American artists. Alma Woodsey Thomas is a wonderful painter who is known for her large colorful paintings. Here are the ones I looked at with the kindergarten classes.

It is amazing the way that some of these students looked at these paintings. Some described the radial ones like "looking down a well", or the stripped ones as roads. I loved hearing all the wonderful comments and inputs the students had. Although these paintings are done using quick brush strokes, when I first saw them they looked like collages of ripped paper to me, so when I created them with the students, we tried using tiny ripped color paper instead of paint. The students had the choice between the radial design (circles), or stripes.