Happy Thanksgiving! This year I am thankful to work with students in K-8 in creating vibrant art to express thoughts, feelings and ideas. I have never felt so blessed.
Kindergarten
Kindergarten students who had class this week continued to work on their primary and secondary colored fish paintings. Check in soon for photo updates!
First Grade
First graders shared in a readaloud of
The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush, by a favorite author and illustrator, Tomie de Paola, before delving into the creation of their own painting of a sunset using warm colors (and a touch of cool purple). This connected wonderfully with our field trip to the Native American pow wow, where we learned of the importance of names in Native American culture. The protagonist of the Tomie de Paola story goes from being "Little Gopher" to "He Who Brought the Sunset to the People." Certainly art can accomplish wondrous things! Next week, students will use cardboard and paint to stamp the Indian Paintbrush, a colorful flower, onto the foreground of their works.
Below, see our recent Mondrian Animal creations that this week went home.
Here are our classroom windows with the same theme!
Second Grade
Second graders put the finishing touches (hay and glue) onto their Scarecrow Collages. It is exciting to have completed this long-term project. We then read a story about a lost and lonely rooster by Eric Carle, noticing the technique that Carle used to create his illustrations. Then, we began making Eric Carle-inspired turkeys for Thanksgiving, after reading this story, which also integrates math knowledge. See the collages below, as well as the Line Cities project that went home just in time for Thanksgiving.
Third Grade
Third graders created cornucopia mosaics inspired by the artwork, or "painting with scissors," of Matisse. Students used bright colors and patterns in making these lively creations, now that we have completed our Chuck Close portraits (see below).
Fourth Grade
Fourth Grade learned about color mixing and the creation of intermediate, as well as secondary, colors, with the example of layered tissue paper. This set us up nicely for our "stained glass" portrait project, in which we will represent the saint that we are studying in our classrooms. We will apply construction paper and tissue paper to contact paper to create a stained glass effect as light hits our portraits.
Here are our recently completed Pumpkin Batiks!
Fifth Grade
Fifth grade completed our watercolor portrait project; early finishers worked on the creation of a tissue paper leaf to catch the last rays of the fall sun. Winter is soon upon us!
Here, you can see recent chalk pastel leaves, and our earlier project, nature contour line drawings with optional bleeding tissue paper painting.
Sixth Grade
Sixth Grade learned about color, reading about the unique artwork of Sandy Skoglund, who used color effectively in her "Radioactive Cats" and other photographs that combined sculpture and photography into stunning images. We continued to work on our Foreshortened Perspective Portraits.
Seventh Grade
Seventh Grade will be incorporating their experiences of our recent Native American pow wow field trip with art in making an ornament to keep for years to come, while keeping the memories of learning of the "heartbeat of Mother Earth," or the drum beat that we all share and that unites us as people.
Eighth Grade
Eighth graders will be combining their knowledge of color with that of form while creating a very special surprise as a group.
Here is a tessellation created by one of our eighth graders, who ventured away from the PART/TRAP method and spontaneously created this piece of art, inspired by M.C. Escher.
Gobble gobble!
