Where would you want to visit?

While going through pictures to create another post, I realized that I had not posted on this 4th grade lesson.  This is the third year that I have taught this lesson and have loved watching it evolve. As the first lesson of the year, I use it to teach about kinds of lines, color, and space. I was surprised this year when asking my 4th graders about environments, how unfamiliar they were with the word "environment."  

We looked at landscape paintings from a few artists, the two we looked at the most were David Bates and Ando Hiroshige. While looking at the paintings, students identified details of setting. They had to describe ways that the artist used color to show time of day, climate, and season. 

This year I found myself pushing the idea of overlapping to create space, as well as adding details to create more interest for their viewers. Students were prompted to choose any kind of environment they would like to visit; actual environments, fantasy environments, even space. The choice was theirs. We had a lot of beaches and mountains, a few outer space scenes, but the fun ones were places like Donut Land, Pizza Land, and a few Candy Lands.  

All students worked on 9x12" drawing paper, and used colored pencil. Always looking for ways to improve, feel free to comment and let me know if you have any ideas.

Students working together for an exciting message to their school

Our first completed project with my After School Art Class. This is my first year working with the After School Program. The goal for this group is to spend the year working on collaborative art projects to fill the halls and walls of our school with Art, large art. 

For our first project, we started with the students working together with a phrase that they wanted to hang in the hallways of the school, a message for our school. The students brainstormed as a group and decided upon "School Rocks Go Roadrunners." I helped them space out and size up their lettering with about two letters per page. Some pages had a connected line that connected to the words. They learned how to leave a letter sized space between words. 

After that, students  traced over their letters with their choice of two or more washable markers. 

We then divided our papers using about four lines, creating around 12 spaces to fill with Zentangle patterns. Students then filled their spaces with patterns using pencil to plot out their design and sharpie to finish it. 

Students had the decision to work on a page individually or with a small group. Almost all students chose to work on their pages individually at first, then after a few times of working on this realized that they could get a page finished faster with a friend, started teaming up. 

It did take some time to complete, but the students had a lot of fun. Some students stuck to the Zentagle patterns from the books I have, but others started creating their own patterns.

The group I have after school is made up of a mix of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. It was very interesting to see how they interact and work together with students of other grade levels. At this point they are starting to not really care about grade levels while working or choosing partners to work with. This really started to make for some fun conversations to listen to as the younger students try to impress the older ones, and the older ones try to help the younger ones. I hope to continue to see a healthy growth of social skills and team work.

 

 Letting the students take pictures of us hanging this long artwork on the hallway made for a few blurry shots, but hey, I am o.k. with it.

A few students who started with us latter made one for my classroom. Unfortunately it is so long, I can not find the space to hang it yet.

Hope you enjoy. Leave any comments you have with constructive criticism on the project, or my blog writing. Always searching for improvement.

Observational Still Life Drawings

One of the major skills I have picked to focus on with my students this year has been observational drawing. If you have been following my blog then you know that I have been focusing on observation with all grades K-5. Over the last two years, my first two years teaching, I noticed that students really struggle with making observations, when drawing, painting, looking at art works, pretty much anywhere and everywhere. So this year I have challenged myself with finding opportunities for every grade level to develop their observational skills.

I knew this would take some time so I had to buy some fake flowers. After I shoved the flowers into paint cups to hold them and placed them in the middle of my classroom tables I noticed an immediate transformation of my room. We now had centerpieces and looked like we were out to lunch. We did some practice drawings first, but still had plenty of propeller flowers, even when the students were looking at roses. But despite the students that no matter how you teach them want to draw propeller flowers there were still plenty of gems. Most students did try to focus on the shapes and lines that they saw. The student whose work is to the right here was the one that blew my mind. He actually listened to my pleas to slow down. Much slower than any other student, his drawing was on the level of college students I have worked with to draw from observation.

As a hint, I take tons of pictures while my students are working. Having Mr. Fleming take a picture of their work seems to be the greatest motivation in the world, even batter than my student gallery in the classroom.

We did use markers to color our entire artworks. This was yet another way to try and get the students to slow down and focus on craftsmanship. Still a hard thing for 2nd graders to do. We did wear out some markers, mostly blue and red, but the students seemed very pleased with their work. I am excited to see how this will affect their future work. This was only the first assignment this year for 2nd grade. A lot of time was spent with effective ways to use markers. We had many conversations about coloring slow enough that the marker has time to saturate the paper, and taking the time to fill in the white holes if we had any. Lots of marker demonstrations.

I hope that throughout the year their will be a significant difference in their drawing skills as we pay a bit more attention to technique and observational skills.
Enjoy the images.

Professional Develpment Training

 

Columbus Day was a teacher work day for us. I am lucky enough to be in a district so large that we get to spend these kinds of days in professional development with other art teachers from our district. This past Monday, another teacher from the district and myself lead a group of mostly new teachers in training focused on classroom management for elementary art teachers. We shared a lot of good things, and have already heard from some of the teachers that attended, telling us that they put some of the things they learned in practice and are already seeing great results.
 
 I am writing this post because I wanted to share some of the pictures of work the teachers did when I shared with them two lessons that I have great success with. One is a 4th grade lesson on Emphasis, Value, and Texture. This lesson uses Chuck Close as inspiration, showing the students that they can overcome obstacles by breaking big jobs down into small pieces and working together. It is one of my favorite lessons. We used a picture of our District Art Supervisor. The final piece is 32"x40" enlarged from an original 8"x10" that was cut into 1"x1" pieces.


The second project I shared with them is a color wheel made with Model Magic. I make these with my 3rd graders each year. We start only with the primary colors and then they have to mix to create the secondary colors. After that, we organize them into a color wheel and then they get to sculpt them into pretty much whatever shapes they want. Finally they are glued down onto black construction paper.

It was a totally different experience teaching teacher instead of elementary school students. I really do think that the results were not too much different than the kids. Enjoy.