Collage/Drawings with Depth

This wasn't an original idea, it came from the Davis Digital textbook for 2nd grade. It was a great lesson though. Students started with three different sized pieces of construction paper (a great way to use odds and ends pieces from other projects). After coming up with an idea of people doing something together, they drew the people on their construction paper pieces, making sure that the people touched the top and bottom of the paper. We then discussed placement, size, and overlap as tools to create depth. Students then cut out their figures and glued them to a 9x12 sheet of construction paper. Lastly, the student used their construction paper crayons to create a background, preferably with a foreground and background. Here are some examples.

Soccer

Playing with friends

Basketball

Boxing

Swimming

Riding Bikes

More soccer

I love the variety of subjects that the students came up with.

Creative Collaborative Collages

This was a great exercise for my students. We had been looking at positive and negative shape as well as rhythm for several weeks. Students had created stencils of a figure in action, based off of gesture drawings we did from some amazing student models (these kids can hold a pose for ever, aka 1 minute). We had used our stencils to make repeated shapes for some rhythm drawings. But before getting rid off the people that we had cut out to make our stencils, we had this little 50 minute collaborative lesson. 

Students worked together in collaborative teams of 4 or 5 students. They had to pick a setting, and show overlapping. Each team was given an 18x24 piece of construction paper in black or light blue, their choice. Students were allowed to use paper from my scrap boxes, scissors, glue, and construction paper crayons. The people in their collages had to be in action, and they had to present their collage to the class at the end, telling us what was happening in their artwork.

I was slightly surprised how much the students were engaged in this assignment. The one above is of jumping on the trampoline, all the way to the sun.

This one was from my special education kids. They told a long story of one of them fixing the roof of the teacher's house, while tow of them went for a car ride.

The project above is awesome. These students asked if they could make it a sculpture. I said sure. It is a camping trip. They even folded the sleeping bag around the character looking up at the stars.

A little game of street basketball.

This has been the most engaged I have seen my 3rd graders get this year in a collaborative project. At my school it seems rare that I see my 3rd graders in imaginative play. This assignment was a real joy.

Make it 3D!

I know I probably shouldn't pick favorites, but the drawing above is my favorite drawing of the week. My 2nd graders started a unit on architecture this week. When given time to draw a building of their own design in 3D, one of my second graders drew this awesome monster gas station. I told them they could draw any kind of building they wanted. What I love about this drawing is the overlapping inside of the gas pump area. We haven't covered overlapping at all. 

This kind of drawing started last year when I taught Kindergartners and first graders how to use diagonal lines to make shapes 3D. They loved it, and yes, we did cover height, width, and depth. What sold them was showing them how to apply this to drawing cars. They went home and practiced drawing cars all summer. Many of them came back as the 2nd grade version of a 3D drawing master. So, for my pretest, they had to draw a square, triangle, circle, and car shape in their art journals, then use diagonal lines to make their shapes 3D. Here are a couple of pretest examples.

Check out that truck. I am impressed.

After their pretest, and before their buildings, we read a bit from our digital textbooks. Our district adopted the Davis Digital art books this year, so I pulled some of the pages up on the Promethean Board. I like to turn the pages into I Spy and Matching games. We discussed what an architect is, and then the time was given to them to design their own building. Here are some more examples.

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.