First Grade Writing with Mondrian Art

Mrs. Percival's first grade class has been learning about writing using a four square writing graphic organizer. After each art class, she returns to the classroom and the children write about their art project using this format. First, they planned the writing project by writing the topic in the middle of the planning sheet and then writing four different supporting items in each of the squares. In this student examples, each student wrote about a diagonal line, horizontal lines, vertical lines, and the three primary colors. Once they planned the writing, they wrote a paragraph based upon the details in the graphic organizer. This is a great basic writing format and teaches expository writing according to the first grade Common Core. This becomes an authentic writing experience because the children are writing about something they made. It builds vocabulary and teaches basic sentence structure as well as how to write a paragraph.

Above: Jocelyn first created the artwork, then she wrote about it using a four square graphic organizer to help structure her writing.

This is a close-up of Andee's planning sheet.

This project teaching Common Core Standards:

Grade 1: ELA.W.2 (English Language Arts Informative/explanative texts which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic and provide some sense of closure.

2nd Grade Fall Windy Day Art

The art lesson this week was really fun! We studied the paintings of Van Gogh and learned how about how great artists create movement in their artwork. We also studied how plants and animals get ready for a change in seasons and we studied a little bit about weather as we created windy day pictures showing plants an animals preparing for cold days ahead. To start this lesson we created leaf rubbings and then we wrote a sentence/poem our leaf. Then we talked about the change of seasons and how some animals migrate, some adapt and some hibernate. We learned about the life cycle of plants and why trees lose their leaves for the winter months. Finally, we got to talk about weather!

You will notice in our pictures that the house and trees are bending to the wind. We used a sharpie to draw trees in the style of Gustav Klimt. Then we added a house that was leaning in the wind, animals getting ready for winter and some leaves blowing in the wind. We colored our pictures and then we used crayons to create movement in the background. Finally, we added a watercolor wash of grey paint to make create a stormy, cold day!

Red Fox and a Yellow Box - First Grade Art

Rhyming Words: The Big Blue Ox, A Red Fox and a Yellow Box

This year in art we have been focusing on art that reinforces stories in our basal reader. As part of our new focus, we are attempting to do sketchbook activities as part of every first grade lesson! This has been quite a new adventure, but the children are doing wonderfully well and are having a lot of fun drawing in their sketchbooks and writing words to go with the lessons.

For our FOX lesson, I selected an illustration from the story and we studied the picture to look for basic shapes. The theme for art this year is "Look and then Draw!" I am trying to teach the children to study the world around them and observe it before they draw. To reinforce this principle, every child was given a small picture of the mama fox and baby to glue in their sketch book. Before starting, I showed them how to draw a little symbolic fox starting with a letter "V". I explained the difference between drawing symbolic art, and drawing art that looks real. Then we looked at the picture in their sketchbook and tried to draw the fox using our EYES instead of our brain! The children drew while I talked them through it! I was personally amazed at the quality of illustrations from the first grade children. They loved this project even though it was difficult.

Observational Art: After we drew in our sketchbook, we created a larger picture using oil pastels. We tried to add texture to our pictures using different colors for our fox and blending them. Then we also added grass to our pictures, also blending two different colors.

The next week, our story was about a bird nest, so we decided to create eggs in the style of Piet Mondrian. We are working on rhyming words, so we reminded the children that the YELLOW BOX in this picture, rhymes with FOX and OX from previous lessons.

Mrs. Peterson created this writing assignment to extend the art project and shared it with other teachers at East Elementary. This year, our main focus in art is to improve the English Language Arts, so we are focusing on writing, vocabulary building, speech and language skills as well as visual art. This can get challenging, so we really appreciate it when the teacher goes the extra mile to reinforce the literary concept back in the classroom!

We had fun creating beautiful art with simple black lines and spots of brilliant color in the style of Piet Mondrian.

Miss Eberhard's class created these Mondrian inspired eggs.