Collaborative Grid Portraits

2nd year in a row doing this lesson with 5th Grade. Students learn about Chuck Close, the grid method, and breaking big jobs into small pieces and sharing in the workload to accomplish big things. Last year my 5th graders created two large portraits of our Principle and Vice Principle. This year 5th graders created portraits two other administrators at our school. These portraits are 32"x 40". Students do not know who they are creating portraits of as they are doing it. I keep it a secret. An 8x10 photo is cut into one inch pieces and spread out among 4 classes of 5th graders. Students enlarge their piece of the portrait to 4"x4" using a grid, then complete it with pencil value. Students do the initial layout and piecing/taping together of the squares. I come back when they are done and straighten up some of their seems. It is a lot of fun to watch the students guess who the portrait is of as it comes together. The whole lesson takes about 3 class times (50 minutes each)to teach and complete. After these are done, we give them to the subject of the portrait as a gift.

Students use a grid with the numbers of the pieces written on it as a map while they put the portrait pieces together.

Students lay their one inch square on top of their value drawn piece for comparison.

Sometimes a few pieces get lost, but special helpers get picked to do the missing pieces. Everyone enjoys this project.

Paint Party 2016 Volume 2

I have been wrapping up our second run of paint parties as a class reward for good behavior. For 3 years, I have felt like dealing with behavior has been a major time killer for my art class. Paint party rewards seem to be helping a ton. Class behaviors have improved dramatically. Kids want to paint. 

In case you missed my last post about paint parties, here is the run down. We have a rotating Friday at my school; which means Monday classes see me one Friday a month, Tuesdays one Friday a month, and so forth. That means each class sees me one extra time once a month. I use this to my advantage. During the four visits prior to a Friday visit to art, classes earn points (5 possible per day). If they get 15 out of 20 points by their Friday in art, they get a paint party.

Essentially, a paint party is just a paint day, but those don't happen often at my school due to large numbers in the classroom and no running water/sink. Painting all day on one day of the week allows me to set up once and take down once. It makes it easy on me, and keeps it energetic and fast paced for the students.

This go around our theme was outside places. I showed the students a photograph that illustrates atmospheric perspective well. We talk about overlapping, how things look smaller farther away, how the color gets lighter for things farther away. We have had some great discussions after asking the question "Why does the color get lighter in the background?" My older grades which have studied the water cycle usually come to the conclusion that evaporation has something to do with it.

Each table received black, white, and one secondary color of paint. During demonstration, students learned about the tints and shades of values. We started with the sky, and worked our way forward with overlapping since we only have the paper on our tables to clean our brushes with. 

Students were allowed to create a painting of any kind of environment they wanted as long as it was outdoors. We even had the opportunity to talk about monochromatic color schemes.

Though this student did not use their color, I love the expressive quality of this painting. Awesome overlapping and rhythm.

This was one of the most rewarding one day assignments I have had in my classroom. What successful rewards do you have for class wide behavior? Please share.

The End Of My First Semester Blogging

Warning! This post is going to have quite a few pictures. 

Friday was the last day of the first semester. I have had a long list of lessons that I have wanted to catch up on posting, but after a weekend of thinking it over, I don't want to spend my whole break blogging. Instead I want to spend it with my kids. So, here is one post to tie up all loose ends. Of course I have a goal for the new year of not getting so far behind on stuff I want to post. Until then, here goes a whole bunch of stuff that I did not get around to posting.

At the beginning of the school year, 5th graders had the choice between two contests to create an artwork for and to enter. This is the piece that we sent off to  a bicycle contest.

 The other contest that 5th graders could choose from was the Fort Worth Stock Show art contest. These horse and farm works are a few of the ones we submitted.

Third graders created Mine Craft inspired self portraits. I got this idea from a post on the blog Shine Bright Zamorano. Here is the link, http://www.shinebritezamorano.com/search/label/minecraft

My third graders loved this. It was a lot of fun. However, I never thought I would spend so much time prepping materials for anything as I did cutting paper squares for this.

Notice the shoes in the picture. My students find it hilarious that I stand on the table to take pictures.

We have a special ed class at our school that meets with the third graders. They excelled at this project and loved it so much that they went back to their classroom and did their own version so that they could keep working on it.

Here is a Kandinsky assignment that kindergarten did as an intro to oil pastels.

They look pretty good hung together in the hallway.

Here are second grades paper weavings from this year. We usually have more time to work on these than we did this year, so they are lacking the pattern that I usually have the students add to their strips before weaving. 2nd grade paper weaving in my room is inspired by Kente clothe. We read The Spider Weaver at the start of the lesson. I had to cut the lesson short after many lost days at our school due to construction.

My fourth graders had a choice of four different ways to show value after creating value scales with pencil, oil pastels, and watercolor. These are from a class that lost the privilege to use oil pastels and water colors, but these three examples were some gems from that group. I hate taking materials away from students, but we have one group at our school that has been quite the challenge this year, and sometimes you have to protect the materials when students are damaging them so that other classes still have them to use.

This is another assignment that I got from Shine Bright Zamarano. It was a very quick assignment allowing students to work together a bit to create a very large work. I will have the whole thing assembled after break and post a picture of it then.

These are a couple of examples from a warm and cool colors assignment that Kindergarten did. We started by creating images with cool colors of things we like to pretend when playing outside. Later we created warm colored windows on top of our drawings with construction paper. This gave some more time for Kindergartners to improve their scissor and glue skills.

My last catch up assignment to post is from the last week of school. Some classes were moved around, and some students were held in their rooms by their home room teachers, so we talked about team work and students created large drawings as a team to portray a subject of their choice. Tips were given about sharing ideas and picking a bottom for their artwork. Also, after the first group, I realized the need to talk about ways to work to make the piece look like one, and not several different artworks on one large paper. These drawings were started by 1st graders, and worked on throughout the day by all other grade levels.

Overall, blogging this year has been an awesome way to reflect on teaching and the goings on of my classroom. Plus, it is nice to have a place to go back and look over what has happened. I haven't quite reached 1000 page views yet, but expect to before semester 2 starts. Thanks to all who have been following this blog and hey, Merry Christmas.

3 Valuable Weeks

With the way my schedule is at my school, students come to art once a week for 50 minutes. With that said, this simple lesson took 3 weeks. In the district that I teach in, our curriculum is based on the elements and principles. Part of our fall curriculum for 4th grade is value. I have not seen evidence over the past few years that my students have held on to an understanding of value, so this year I decided to try a new approach. Prior to doing any works of art with value, my 4th graders made value scales using pencil, oil pastels, and water colors.

These media worked great for this lesson since the process for creating values with each one is so different. This also gave me a chance to teach some watercolor and pastel techniques that I have not covered in the past. Students experimented with varying pressure to create values with pencil, adding white and black to a color with the pastels, and diluting their paint with varied amounts of water for water colors. Also, this gave one more opportunity to practice our skills measuring and drawing straight lines with a ruler, something that drives me nuts that most students seem to not know how to do.

Obviously, we used pencil, oil pastels, and water colors, but we also used multimedia paper. This gave an opportunity for me to say "media" a million times and to explain it. Our value scales are just the first stage to a lesson that we are working on currently that is focused on rhythm. Students are using values created with one color in and all three of these media for their first mixed media project of the year. Some good scaffolding going on here. I will post about the rhythm assignment in a couple of weeks when we are finished, so far this has all been very engaging to them, though it doesn't look as exciting.