3rd Grade Turtle Rubber Stamps

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.

Mrs. Sampson went to Boston!

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.

1st Grade: Sun and Moon Celestial Art

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.

3rd Grade Vasarely Op-Art

3rd Grade: Vasarely Op-Art

We had fun looking at optical illusions as we studied the art of Victor Vasarely. We learned how to create our own Op-Art using simple squares and a floating sphere. This was a fun art project that combined math with art and the results are visually stunning!

Vocabulary words for this lesson: Fraction, Line, Sphere

Curriculum Tie-In: Math

Art Concepts: contrast, pattern, shading

Duck Stamp Contest

I invited a few students to participate in a special art class as a reward for good behavior in their classes. This elite group of Sixteen 2nd and 3rd graders came to the art room for a special lesson on wetland conservation. We studied photographs of ducks and watched a movie of ducks swimming around in a pond. We talked about why we needed to conserve the wetland habitats for the ducks. After studying the ducks, each child drew their very own duck with owl pastels and then painted their picture with watercolors. We submitted these pictures to the Utah Division of the Federal Duck Stamp contest. Six students were selected as winners and are invited to a special luncheon to receive ribbons. We are proud of their outstanding work.

Our Spring Art Show was Fabulous!

If you wandered through the halls of East Elementary last week, you would have felt the rising level of excitement in our school as the children were getting ready for the art show! Every class was preparing informal performances, children were busy painting and creating art to show off to their parents and the teachers were busy putting up art. The big night arrived and everyone came! Children were singing and dancing and creating art with their parents. The art was beautiful and there was magic for everyone. We want to thank the parents for all of their support and for making a wonderful evening.

I Like Art

I haven't blogged in a while because getting ready for the spring art show took about every waking moment of the day for me! Now that I am coming up for air, I will try to catch up and let you know about the art projects we are working on.

The art show was fabulous! I don't know any other word to describe it. It took a school wide effort, but it was so fun to see every class engaged and interacting with parents, enjoying art and celebrating together. I will post more about art show, but we are going to start with this video of Mrs. Bostick's class doing a movement activity to Poetry.

This freestyle poem was written by the children in Mrs. Bostick's 3rd grade class. Heather Wilson, our amazing dance coach, came to school and worked with the children to create a movement activity to go along with the poem. The overall effect was very fun and the children really enjoyed performing this for the parents at the art show.

This poetry activity was inspired by Allen LaFleur, one of my fellow BTS specialists. He taught a poetry writing / dramatic interpretation workshop at a recent teacher conference and I had to come back to the school and try it out.

Many thanks to Mrs. Bostick for letting me experiment with her class and push them to greater heights of artistic expression!