May was flower month at East Elementary! The 3rd grade students learned about the life cycle of flowers as they learned to sketch different flowers and then paint them using acrylic paint on canvas art boards. The students mixed their own colors of paint to create highlights and shadows on their vase and flowers. This was really challenging for the students but we had a wonderful time. Each child presented his or her painting to their mother at a special program on May 13th.
In our reading classes we read a story entitled “Me and Uncle Romie”. In this story, a young boy visits his Uncle in the city and spends some time with him. Uncle Romie is a collage artist… someone who takes the everyday things around us and creates art from them. At the end of the story, Uncle Romie gives James a beautiful piece of art that helps James remember his trip. Then James created this “collage” birthday card to send his Uncle.
To reinforce some of the concepts of this story, each child made his or her “own” piece of collage art using art principles we learned about in class. Ideally, this collage art represents things important to each child. These collage boards were just beautiful and we had a fun time creating this artwork.
After the art show, we started having fun doing some new art processes. In this lesson we learned how to make rubber stamps and the children had fun printing images with their new stamps. We learned that our printed image will be a mirror image of the original and that was sometimes hard for the children to understand until they saw the printing process in action. In this art lesson, each child got to make two rubber stamps. For the first stamp, we all made turtles. To start off the lesson, we each looked at photographs of real turtles and then each child drew turtles in their sketch book. We started with contour lines, then we added structure lines and shading. Then we practiced drawing the same turtle on a piece of sticky back foam. We pushed hard with the pencil to make a deep impression and then we cut out the turtle and stuck it on a piece of cardboard. We added a little handle with masking tape and we were ready to print! For our second stamp, the child could draw anything they wanted and then we put our foam on a little wooden block. This was a fun project for the children and it is interesting to see all the little turtles and other interesting artwork.
I had a wonderful opportunity to go to Boston and learn how to tangle from Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts, the artists who created the art form of Zentangle. I am now a Certified Zentangle Teacher (CTZ) and I came back with lots of great ideas on how to teach this even more effectively to the children in our school. 
If you come visit the school this week, you will just have to smile a little as you walk down the hall by the art room. On one side of the hall, there is shimmering satin in yellow and orange. The other side of the hall sports the same satin in blue and violet. The first graders have been learning about the sun and the moon, night and day, warm and cool. Put it all together and you have a beautiful artwork that brings a little sunshine into your life.
