Color Wheel Week

It is color wheel week! We are having fun playing with mixing color. The kindergarten classes are making color wheels from Play-doh and the first grade classes are creating swirling clouds of color with powdered paint and ice cubes! There is always that thrilling moment when the children start to mix the colors and a new color appears like magic! This is fun for children of all ages.

The first grade classes made this little hurricane color wheel using powdered paint and ice cubes. I saw this idea at an art conference four years ago, but I had never tried it until now. I will definitely do this again. It was fun for the children and it was a great science experiment for them. The children learned problem solving techniques as well as cause and effect. To start, we gave each child 3 little piles of paint in the primary colors. This color wheel was mixed using an ice cube with a popsicle stick frozen into it. As the ice cube started to melt, it was just wet enough to mix the paint. We tried this many different ways, and the best way was to just start with yellow, pretending that there was a little hurricane that gradually moved over to to the red, then gradually moved over to the blue and then back again to the yellow. The best color wheels were made fairly quickly, without stopping. If the ice cube melts too quickly it just makes a big mess. If the child tries to clean off the ice cube between colors, it seemed to cause more problems because they lost "the flow" of the project. Ideally, each child will create a color wheel with 6 colors... starting with yellow, moving to orange, red, purple, blue and then green! This was fabulously fun! I like to do it over and over again just to play with the colors and see the magic happen before my eyes.

We tied this project in with a story about a big blue OX. The next week we drew a red FOX and then we created a yellow BOX creating art with all three primary colors, but still reinforcing rhyming words and focusing on literacy. All of our are lessons this year are tying into basal reading stories and reinforcing elements of the English Language Arts Common Core as well as science, social studies and math whenever possible.

Here are a few finished color wheels.

The children are so proud of their work!

Here, the kindergarten children are showing off their little play-dough color wheels. This is a favorite project. We read "White Rabbits Color Book" before we mixed our color wheels. Again, we just used the 3 primary colors to create all the colors on the color wheel. The kindergarten children were especially delighted as they saw new colors appear before their eyes!

Constellations, Wild Things and Pattern Cats

We are back to school and having fun with our artwork!

The 2nd graders have been studying space and they have been creating these beautiful constellation pictures based on the book Zoo in the Sky published by the National Geographic Society.

This first picture is a lovely bird of paradise floating in the sky.

Here we have Draco...

And finally the lovely swan, Cygnus.

This has to be one of my all-time favorite art projects. Every one is so beautiful!

For a copy of my lesson plan follow the following link:

http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=27205

While the 2nd graders were busy creating constellations, the 1st graders were learning how to draw cats with basic shapes. This art project was based on the first story in our basal reader, Sam Come Back! Once we finished drawing our cats, we added pattern! The cute little mouse was a creative touch!

... And the Kindergartner's were having the most fun of all! We read the favorite story, Where the Wild Things Are, and then we created our very own Wild Thing pictures!

End of year projects... Part Four

During the last weeks of school, I try to give the teachers a lot of different ideas for the final art projects of the year. I adapt each lesson to fit what the teacher needs, and many teachers selected different art projects. All of the art projects tied in with either the science, social studies or language arts core. Mrs. Purdy's 3rd grade class learned how to do a very creative art technique adapted from the Zentangle Teacher Training class I attended in Massachusetts. For this fun art lesson, we used large paper and markers. First we just wrote our name using our very best handwriting, then we added an aura around our name and finally we learned how to create "Mooka" ... a free flowing tangle pattern. Simply beautiful! The children had a lot of fun with this project.
Ms. Jacobson's class learned about the Aztec Indians and created beautiful foil masks using silver foil and wooden sticks to draw the designs. The children added a variety of pattern and texture to their masks. Once finished, we carefully cut the mask out and mounted it on heavy cardstock.
Mrs. Bostick's 3rd grade class did a similar project, but they chose to focus on butterflies. We studied the beautiful symmetry of the butterfly and looked at actual photographs of butterflies. Each child sketched a butterfly in their sketchbook and they traced it lightly onto the foil. Then they added pattern and design to their butterflies, cut them out and mounted them are heavy cardboard. Some children painted their butterflies with watercolor paint.

End of year projects... Part Three

We have been learning to sketch in 2nd grade art, but most of the time our sketches are pretty simple. During the last week of school, Mrs. Marx's 2nd grade class came to art and we decided to sketch a photograph of a clownfish. We started by drawing the contour edge to get the basic shape, then we added structure lines and finally we added pattern and shading! These are amazing sketches!

End of year projects... Part Two

During the last week of school some of the 3rd grade classes had fun playing with colors on the color wheel. We learned that warm colors advance and cool colors recede. Each child created a picture using oil pastels. We tried to put warm colors in the foreground of the picture and cool colors in the background. Then we looked at our pictures with 3-D glasses to give our pictures a 3-D effect! This was a very fun and relaxing project.
The ocean was a popular theme.
Miss Foley's 2nd grade class had a chance to learn Zentangle after I got back from the CZT class in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. Every child created their own individual masterpiece and then we put them together to create this beautiful class collage.

The last week of school can get a little bit crazy!
Each child made one 6 inch by 6 inch square and then we put them all together. This shows everyones interpretation of the same project! It is just beautiful and very amazing.

End of year projects... Part One

We had a lot of fun with unique art projects at the end of the school year but I ran out of time and didn't get many of them posted. I thought I would take a minute and pick a few of the best ones to share before things get too busy this year.
Kindergarten students studied the art of Paul Klee and made their own "Castle in the Sun" by gluing geometric shapes on brown paper. The children loved this project and every castle was different!
The first grade students had a great time learning the Japanese are of Gyotaku. Mrs. Peterson brought it a lovely large carp and each child was able to make a beautiful print from it using acrylic paints.
Some of the third grade classes had the chance to paint these stunning warm and cool Lizards. First we practiced drawing a lizard in our sketchbooks, then we drew a lizard on our watercolor paper with a white crayon. We added patter and design. Finally we painted our lizard with either warm or cool colors, then we painted the background with the opposite family of colors. You could do this same project by drawing almost any animal.

This is one of our all-time favorite projects. The inspiration for this artwork comes from Mimi Thomas and her collection of "My Painted Ponies". I showed the children how to draw the basic shape of a pony and then we divided our pony into sections and decorated each section with symbolic art that represented all the things we had learned during the year. Finally we painted our pony with watercolors, cut it out and mounted it on a piece of art board to create a beautiful piece of art suitable for framing.

Arts Express Conference

Four teachers from East Elementary went to the ART EXPRESS conference sponsored by BYU and Beverley Taylor Sorenson. This was a great workshop and focused on helping teachers learn how to better integrate the arts into the core curriculum. Mrs. Embleton, Mrs. Purdy, Mrs. Gale and Mrs. Sampson had a great time! Each teacher went to different classes and they learned lot of great things to help them do a better job teaching next year!
Mrs. Embleton and Mrs. Purdy studied how to teach recycling and nature by using all four art forms. They created visual art and learned to use dance, drama and music to create a powerful "informance" at the closing ceremony. The above two photos show each teacher with their back to nature self-portraits.
This is Mrs. Sampson's tear art landscape project!

Parents are invited to come to this workshop and we hope a few of you will join us next year. It will be June 11-12, 2012!