It’s the last week of art class and the weather is lovely. For their final project, the 5th and 6th graders did observational drawings of the weeds in our school garden.
Materials:
Clipboards
Copy paper
Colored pencils
Weeds
Each student picks one weed from the ground. They should try to keep the root intact. Weeds must be no longer than the paper.
Clip paper to board, then clip top of weed to the left side of the board (left-handed kids should clip weed on the right).
Draw a scale drawing of the weed.
Start with a long stem line. Mark leaf placement with short lines alone the stem line. Then draw the contour of the leaves. Look closely at the leaf veins and draw them. Add flowers and roots. Finally, draw irregularities such as bite marks.
What a fabulous way to end the art year. We practiced our drawing skills and weeded the garden path. Bonus!
Our first graders just completed their Mother’s Day project – portraits of their Moms in the style of Amadeo Modigliani.
Day 1: Learn about Modigliani’s style; practice drawing.
We talked about how the artist’s style included almond-shaped eyes, long skinny noses, tiny lips, and long thin necks. Click here for my Modigliani powerpoint. Students did a practice drawing of Mom on copy paper.
We drew our portraits on watercolor paper using pencil. We colored with oil pastels. I offered several skin color options. Students were encouraged to rub two colors of oil pastel in the background.
This year I sent the classroom teachers an explanatory email with images of Modigliani’s work and a link to his biography. The email will go home in the weekly classroom newsletter. (Why? Last year a mother commented she didn’t understand her gift – when I explained she said she had never heard of Modigliani).
Here is a 2-minute video of Modigliani’s portraits of women.
Who loves dessert? Everyone, including second graders. Each year I teach a Wayne Thiebaud-inspired dessert lesson. This year we created compositions focusing on repetition of geometric forms.
Dessert Geometry (and Common Core connections)
Studying Thiebaud’s art is an opportunity to incorporate geometry into your lessons. Try and time your lessons to tie into to the math lesson in the general ed. classroom.
We looked at images of Wayne Thiebaud’s dessert art, and identified shapes and forms. Here are some of the forms we identified:
Sphere: gum balls, scoops of ice cream
Right Triangular Prism: pie wedges, cake wedges
Square Prism: petit four (see above image)
Cylinder: layer cake
Rectangular Prism: Jolly Ranchers candy!!! (OK, Thiebaud didn’t paint Jolly Ranchers. A student came up with that one) 🙂
Use teacher-made or student-made tracers (we used both). Students traced their templates with a pencil onto the paper. The composition were encouraged to fill the paper with a single type of dessert in a variety of flavors. It was OK to have the dessert coming off the page, and it was also OK to overlap.
(Note: I know some art teachers disapprove of tracers; I think the use of them in this project reinforces the tie-in to geometry and repetition).
Students then colored their desserts with oil pastels, adding details such as sprinkles, cherries, and chocolate swirls. They outlined the desserts with oil pastels. Finally, they painted the background with a single color of tempera cake.
Second Grade results:
Second graders used circle, triangle, and ellipse tracers as a starting point for these artworks.
If your administration asks if you incorporate math (or STEM/STEAM) in your lesson plans, teach this one and happily reply ‘yes’. After all, shape and form are elements of art. This art project reinforces geometry in a fun way.
Heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow. If I happened to have some powdered tempera around, I might try this charming rainy day art project from Arts and Activities magazine, September 1969.
Enjoy! Happy Throwback Thursday! Stop by on Thursdays to see what I’ve found in my vintage art education collection.
If you want a fun, colorful Valentines day craft project, try Shrinky Dinks!
What? You’ve never tried Shrinky Dinks? They are sheets of thin plastic. You color, cut and bake them. When baked, they shrink to 1/3 the size! They have been popular since the 1970s and kids LOVE them. Watch this brief video to see how they work.
Option 1) Cut each sheet of plastic into quarters (I do this on the paper cutter) and distribute. Students draw a heart, color it on the frosted side with colored pencils, and cut it out themselves. The heart necklace above was made this way.
Option 2) Adult pre-cuts the hearts and distributes. Students color with colored pencils. All the heart pins in the photo above were made this way (with the help of a parent volunteer).
Bake at 325F
Then bake in a toaster oven or regular oven at 325 degrees F for about three minutes. Tip: watch the shrinky dinks through the oven window. They need to curl up and then flatten. Don’t take them out before they’ve flattened! We let them flatten, count to 30 and then remove from the oven.
For this project, one of our teachers brought her toaster oven to school and called her students two by two to watch their valentines shrink. THEY LOVED IT!
Necklace, Pin or Magnet
For a necklace, punch with a hole punch BEFORE baking. For a pin, hot glue on a pin back after baking. You can use magnetic tape or hot glue on a magnet.
Happy Valentines Day!
Enjoy!
Happy Throwback Thursday! Stop by on Thursdays to see ‘old school’ art projects!
(available at Michael’s)