Pigs, Cows, And Friendship Portraits

When I originally created this lesson last year, I was looking for an idea of a way to help my students learn not to say mean things about each other's artwork. I was tired of 1st graders coming up to me crying about how so and so said their artwork was ugly. In my search, I came across the perfect book; When Pigasso Met Mootisse, by Nina Laden

I love any chance to teach my students about the difference between an author and an illustrator, so we read quite a few books. This one is great because it works as an art history intro to Picasso and Matisse, which we study more about later in the year. It opens up the dialogue about what is nice to say about others artwork, and what isn't, and what happens when we aren't nice.

After reading the book to the class, we talk about self portraits and I teach them about proportion. During my first year of teaching, I thought proportion was best left to be taught to older grade levels, not kindergartners and first graders. Boy was I wrong. They eat it up, and catch on pretty well. After self-portraits, we work on portraits of our best friend. All of this is done on 12x18 paper folded in half with a self-portrait on one side and a portrait on the other. I do encourage the kids to add shapes or lines to the background for pattern.

Next comes color. We outline with marker, and color in with crayon. Most students want to use regular old realistic coloring for their portraits, but a lot of them due follow me down the road of arbitrary color. I never use flesh tones for skin in my examples. After all, we are looking at Matisse and Picasso portraits and self-portraits everyday at the beginning of each class that we work on this assignment. WWMD or What Would Matisse Do? I tell them, "Have fun with the colors" and "It is your job to find ways to make your drawings fun". Anyways, here are a few finished examples. Unfortunately, I did not take as many pictures as I wanted too. There are many more that I really wish I had taken pictures of to share.

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. 

2nd Grade Lichtenstein Self Portraits

This is one of my favorite lessons. I saw examples somewhere on the Internet last year and thought, "hey that looks like fun". I have learned somethings teaching this for the second year and this year's projects turned out even better than the previous year.

So here's the rundown. We started off by looking at an image of one of Lichtenstein's paintings that is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Students identified the painting only had primary colors, looked like it came from a comic book, and told a story. These observations were the basis for our works.

We worked together to create self-portraits that were big on our paper, had good proportions, and had either a thought cloud or a word bubble (we had a fun time discussing the difference). Students were to either write something they would say in a bubble, or something they think about in a cloud. Surprisingly, many students actually followed directions to make the words big enough to read from far away. After making any corrections, students traced their drawings with black sharpie.

The next step was to use multicultural washable markers to color our skin color. I had students test the markers on the back of their papers and hold their hand next to the test spot to find the closest match to their own skin. This always leads to a great discussion on how all people are different dark or light versions of brown and no one is really white or black.

Our final step was adding our primary colors with crayon. In all steps, students were expected to show their best craftsmanship, filling in white and keeping our colors at a unified darkness, as well as trying to make them smooth looking and not rushed.

I love this assignment because it helps me to know a little more about the students personal interests and character.

The student that created this self-portrait always impresses me. She has not spoke a word to one person at our school in two years, but has the most phenomenal artwork.

This may be my favorite from this year. The student really showed his personality.

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.