Eric Carle Art 2012

We love Eric Carle at East Elementary!  

This year the first grade classes were getting ready for their program and as part of the preparation, each class decided to create Eric Carle art that was unique to the program and went along with the theme for each class. For the first part of this lesson we painted beautiful textured paper.  For the next lesson we created different pictures drawing and cutting different shapes from our beautiful patterned paper.  The kindergarten classes also celebrated spring by making Eric Carle butterflies.

 The Kindergarten classes all read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and then created pretty symmetrical butterflies using basic shapes.

The wings on this one are very creative!

Mrs. Percival's class created Roosters.  In reading about Eric Carle's history, we discovered that one of the first drawings he did was based on a little rooster and an ox that his teacher stamped on his paper.  From that moment on, roosters have been a recurrent theme throughout his work.  This was project was especially fun because the pictures turned out so cute and the children were able to make each one creatively.  We started with a basic egg shape for the body, then added the neck feathers, a head, curvy tail feathers.  The children drew the legs with a crayon.  All of these pictures are so cute!

 Mrs. Gerber's learned about radial symmetry and created spring flowers.

Miss Eberhard's class created frogs. The frogs were super cute and super easy!  Every child drew one large oval for the body. Then they drew 8 smaller ovals for the legs, little finger ovals, half circles for the eyes and cute shapes for the tongue. They cute out the shapes, arranged the frog any way they wanted and glued it all down. We added details with a sharpie.

Mrs. Brinkerhoff's class made bees to go along with their school program.  This was a little hard for the children to visualize, but they were still very cute. 

Mrs. Evan's class wanted to create "slugs" so we worked on this and ended up making a slug body and then added a little curved shell.  We found this drawing in one of Eric Carle's books.  It was cute and easy to do this simple two piece snail.  We added a spiral with colored chalk on the back of the shell to add a little bit of decoration.

Miss Zirker's class created beautiful spring kites.  This looks simple, but it ended up being one of the most complicated projects, mostly because I didn't manage it very well.

 To make the kite, we had each child cut triangles from a template, then cut each triangle in half and share half with a friend so they could end up with 4 different colors in their kite. The mirror image got us in trouble.  Next time, we will tell the children to make their kite and then have everyone share the RIGHT half pieces!  We had kids sharing the left side and then trading it for a right side and it didn't always work out. The children had trouble visualizing how the kite would go back together and it got complicated!   Miss Zirker and I were running around trying to help the children put all the pieces back together so it actually looked like a kite.  I will do better if we ever do it again!

Mrs. Rutledge was focusing on doing chores and cleaning house, so her class creating these darling little cottages!  This was fun project and the children were able to cute basic squares and triangles to create little houses.

Mrs. Peterson's class made cute little people with umbrella's standing in a rainstorm and Miss Bowcutt's class created a scene from "The Very Tiny Seed" showing someone stepping in the mud. See pictures of these two projects in our 1st grade spring art post.  I wasn't able to get a photo of these projects before we put them up in the hall.

After everyone finished their Eric Carle projects, the classroom teachers put them up on display for the first grade program!  The halls are looking beautiful and we will leave this display up for our  upcoming Art Show on April 11th!  Spring is finally coming to East Elementary!