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.

HEY STELLA!

For three weeks now, my 1st graders have looked at the artwork of Frank Stella. I do feel that these are a little more "in the style of" Frank Stella than I would like. But hey, they gave us an opportunity to focus on some skills that I have noticed over the past two years students need a bit more practice in; placement, coloring with markers, and cutting with scissors.

During this first grading cycle (6 weeks) in my district, 1st graders focus only on lines, and start to move toward shapes. We started this year practicing using a ruler to make straight lines. Next we were to explore curved lines. Since we

looked at Gene Davis for straight lines, I decided we would stay in a similar vein and discover Frank Stella.

I shared with my students the first time I saw a Frank Stella painting in person at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and how I was blown away by the huge wall of color that stood in front of me with its big swooping curved lines. We looked at some images of his works taking note of what kinds of lines we could find, and how they made shapes.

For this assignment, we used clear protractors.

Once we were done looking through them like sunglasses, we talked about placement. I encouraged students to lay their protractors on their paper and experiment with where they wanted to place the shape of it, changing their idea several times and selecting the best placement. We did this three times, purposely overlapping a bit each time to create new shapes. I learned after the first class that did this not to trace our shape more than three times. Way too many lines after three. After tracing our semicircle shapes, we used an eraser and selected a few areas only that we wanted to edit, removing lines that would create small spaces of color, or helping make some shapes more interesting.

After editing our drawing, students used markers to fill in the newly created shapes with color. We put a lot of effort into slowing down and allowing the marker enough time to soak into the paper so that we could not see through it. 1st graders want to color so fast with markers that it looks like they are drying out even when they are not. A lot of attention was given to slowing down during the coloring of this project. We also had demonstrations on ways to color to without having white holes in our color. Many students were directed to go back and put more attention on filling the shapes with color and slowing down to look for areas that needed more work. The opportunity to really focus on quality and not subject matter was one of the main reasons for creating this project.

 Our final step was to carefully cut out our designs and glue them on black construction paper. Glue and  scissor use are some of the skills that I feel 1st graders need a bit more practice with so that they can have more confidence as the move through school. This assignment allowed us to follow our scissor rules, turn our paper while cutting, and listen carefully to directions such as "do not cut your design into more than one piece." This was also a great first opportunity this year to practice "dot dot not a lot", which I was surprised how well my students did this year. In the past, it has been a challenge to keep their dots small, and not have "puddle, puddle, a lot".

A Day I Saw A Rainbow

 This was a rather simple one day project with my Kindergartners. In keeping with my goals this year of focusing on skills with my Kindergartners and 1st graders, this was an assignment made to teach three things; drawing big, drawing curved lines, and marker skills (including listening to the cap click when closing the markers). For some gross motor skills, we practiced making the biggest curved lines we could while standing next to our seats starting as far as we could to one side, touching the floor, then stretching toward the ceiling lights as we came across to touch the floor on our other sides. We also did the reverse, the biggest happy faces we could draw in the air with our fingers.

We discussed times that we had seen a rainbow, and what kinds of weather we have on days when we see rainbows. To my surprise, some students claimed they had never seen a rainbow. While that is believable, it still made me just a bit sad. After discussing times we had seen a rainbow then created our drawings of "A Day I Saw A Rainbow." The kindergartners as always were super excited for the first time to use markers in the art room. Being the first time they had used markers with me, I demonstrated ways to take our time, to fill in areas with color, to fill our pages with color leaving no white, and not let our marker caps get away from us. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with how well the Kindergartners did for only their 3rd assignment in art, and one that focused on slowing down and really filling our pages with color.

Color Field Kinder and First

Kindergarten and First grade have always been the two areas that I feel I struggle with the most. This year I am trying a different approach. I have decided to focus more on motor skills and manipulation of media with them. The curriculum that we follow in our district requires that we teach "lines" to these two grade levels for the first six weeks of the year. I decided this year to look at three kinds of lines with them; straight, curved, and zigzag. We will have one production assignment for each kind of line. Starting with straight lines we are looking at the artwork of Gene Davis.

Way back when I went to college the first time, I was introduced to the artwork of Gene Davis in my color theory class. Looking at reproductions in books, I remember not being totally knocked over with enthusiasm. That all changed during a visit I made to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta Georgia during an exhibit which featured works of his, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and other color field artist. Standing in front of these massive walls of colors changed my entire perspective on the artworks of such artists.

Franklin's Footpath Gene Davis 1972

To try to give my students such an experience I showed them works by Gene Davis, blown up as large as I can with my projector, letting them know that many of these works are even larger in person. The room filled with excitement when I showed them Davis's Franklin Footpath from 1972. This was a great time to have the "what is art?" talk with kindergarten and first graders.

Kindergarten


For my kindergarteners, the main focus was some introductory art skills, mostly folding paper and coloring in an area with crayons until the space is filled and the color is dark.

Students were given 9x12" manilla drawing paper. First they worked on writing their name. Then we focused on folding our paper lengthwise, then lengthwise again. This gave us four basic stripes. Kindergarteners were shown to trace the creases with a light colored crayon. When we started coloring, we started with our favorite color, and worked on slowing down and coloring one stripe at a time. This is some challenging stuff for the second week of school ever (the case for many of my kindergarten students).

We slowed this down enough to cover two times of meeting in my class. Before finishing on the second day, we read A Bad Case Of The Stripes, discussing what an illustrator is, and the illustrations of David Shannon.

First Grade

First graders also learned a new skill, one I have noticed even middle schoolers struggle with, drawing a straight line with a ruler. In the past I have waited till second grade to use rulers with my students for drawing straight lines. However, last year I took a chance with kindergarten and first grade, teaching them how to draw forms (3D Shapes). They blew my mind and were even able to draw 3D houses and even cars. This year when they came back to school you could tell that they had been drawing 3D all summer.

Excited to see their progress, I knew they could handle straight lines with rulers. Sure enough, we practiced a few times on the back of their paper and they got it. The trick I told them was making a big L with the hand they do not draw with, then putting it in the middle of the ruler and pushing down super hard, like the Hulk, then keeping their pencil against the ruler and dragging it from the top to their chest. I told them that I had to see their muscle on their ruler hand. This worked great.

Like the kindergarteners, my first graders also had to work on coloring darkly with crayon and filling the space so that we could not see the paper. I tried to encourage them to make some fat stripes and some skinny, but most still played it safe and made stripes that were fairly uniform. This was a simple project, but full of skills that will help with everything we do in the future.

Lines of Observation

The second week of school is now over. Time to create my first classroom post. With all of the craziness of the first few weeks of school I am trying to take it a little easy on the students and give them assignments that are challenging but not full of pressure. 

Art Journals

Last year I started having my students make an art journal. This is where we keep all of our "bell work." When the students come into the room and find there seat, we start off class with a 5 to 10 minute assignment to introduce what we are doing for the day. This is usually where they learn vocabulary, and have an opportunity to describe, analyze, interpret, or judge. So, for the first day in class this year we created our first journals by folding in half a 9x12 sheet of manila drawing paper for our cover, and 5 sheets of 9x12 newsprint for the inside pages. Students learned the procedure for their art heading by putting it on the front of their journal, and then were given the task of being a cover artist and designing the cover of their journal. These journals will last us the first half of the school year. Last year I had 3rd grade through 5th grade work in their art journals, this year I am including 1st and 2nd grades as well.

Observation and Line

I am starting my third year as an art teacher now, and one thing that I decided for this year is that my students need more exercise in observing, and creating observational drawings, or paintings, or whatever else we can record observations with. The curriculum in my district calls for starting the year out teaching about lines. So, we had a small assignment this week creating contour drawings. This assignment was given to both 2nd and 5th graders, mostly because I wanted to see what differences there would be between the two age groups, but also because this kind of work scaffolds well into the assignments I have planned for those two grade levels this year.

I sold the students on this assignment by talking about exercising to build strong muscles, and how artist have exercises to build strong art skills. I let them know that we were going to do some artist exercises. After folding our papers into fourths and labeling the boxes, we had four exercises. First was drawing a paint bottle I set on their table using only one line and not picking up our pencils till we were done. Next was doing the same thing without looking at our paper, but focusing on the bottle. For the third exercise, we had to draw only the outline, but could pick up our pencil if needed. Lastly, I gave them the rest of class to do their best line drawing of the bottle, looking for details, and making corrections as needed.

Throughout the process I made sure to give them tips about looking carefully at what kinds of lines made the shape of the bottle, even some talk toward the end about thick and thin lines. My students seemed way more engaged in this than many lessons we have had in the past, and created some very honest drawings. It was a great learning experience for the students and for me.

Here is one of my favorite drawings that came from this exercise. Tons of character.