1st Grade Winter Art

The first grade art projects created during January were beautiful! Each group of classes selected their own "winter" themed art project and then each class displayed their artwork in the gym as decorations for the first grade program. If you get a chance, come visit the school and see all the beautiful work while it is still up. I am going to share a few highlights about each art project.

This was a busy week for us. There was no school on Monday so we started in on Tuesday. Miss Eberhard's and Miss Bowcutt's classes painted beautiful winter trees with snowmen and little cardinals. I was nervous about teaching this class because I had never done such a detailed painting with such young children, but they turned out great! We had almost every paintbrush in the classroom dirty before we were done and Miss Bowcutt was amazing as she helped wash all the brushes for Miss Eberhard's class that followed. The children learned a lot of fun painting techniques including how to make tree branches and then to create objects from simple shapes. We also learned how to make shadows. This was a fun and beautiful project.

On Wednesday Mrs. Zirker's and Mrs. Reary's classes painted Cardinals in the snow. This was a "close-up" view of a tree branch from one of the trees in the winter scene pictures. We learned to make tree branches with"bumpy" organic lines and then we created our cardinals by painting basic shapes. We used a new kind of "cake" tempera for the black accents and the beaks. This classic winter picture is a favorite and the children did a great job!

The next day, Mrs. Gerber's and Mrs. Percival's classes created beautiful pictures using a white oil pastel on white paper. We practiced making tree branches first, then we drew trees, a snowman, a bunny and a deer. We got to practice drawing branches on the snowman for arms, and then on the deer for antlers. We made stars in the sky using simple shapes. Finally we painted the entire picture with beautiful hues of violet and blue creating a sparkly winter scene. This was one of my favorite projects because it was so simple and yet so beautiful. Mrs. Gerber extended this project by going back to her classroom and having her children write about it. I will post more pictures of her project in the next few days. I was amazed at how well her children integrated important elements from this art lesson.

Finally, on Friday we created penguins with Mrs. Peterson's, Mrs. Evans' and Mrs. Ruteledge's classes. This was a totally different activity than the earlier classes. We looked at books about penguins. We painted a snow scene and then we started painting with "scissors" to create penguins that were jumping and sliding in our snow. We talked about basic shapes and how we could use them to create art. This was very fun and the children had a good time trying to figure out how to make their penguin slide down the hill. In the last 10 minutes of class we each had a chance to make a little "clay" penguin by combining spheres and egg shapes. I will post pictures of the little clay penguins in another post. These were very very cute. Every child got to take their little penguin with them back to class.

This was a very busy week, but as the display was put together for the program, it was fun to see so many projects and also to see the quality of the work. I think that the children are creating amazing art for their age level and I have to give credit to the "art" climate that is becoming more and more evident in our school.

As I see the classroom teachers doing more and more integrated projects with their children and using the art principles they learn by doing side-by-side teaching, the children are gaining more confidence and they are really becoming amazing artists.

I want to thank the parents and teachers who support the art program in our school. During the next few weeks I will try to post teacher extensions on this blog. These extensions are art projects that the teachers are doing with your children outside of art class... and most of them correlate with core subjects, reading, math, social studies and science.