Kindergarten Clay Pendants on Artsonia

All of the clay pendants by Kindergarten are on Artsonia.

Kindergarten Clay Pendants

Kindergarten students were very excited to work with clay. They wanted to take them home right away. It was hard for them to understand that clay needs time to dry. First Students flattened a piece of clay using a big rolling pin. Then, they used texture tools to add fun designs into the clay. They used the “printing gadgets” like various dried out marker caps, paint bottle lids, thread spools, etc. Old broken sea shells made interesting textures. They could not press too hard or they would cut through the flat pancake of clay. When the textures looked good, they picked out a cookie cutter to cut out a shape from the best part of their big pancake. Later, Ms. Yocca punched a hole in the top for the string. Then they went into the kiln, a big hot oven for clay. The gray wet clay became hard and white. Students colored very hard with special construction paper crayons. They colored until their fingers hurt. They made the crayon look great by painting with black paint. Ms. Yocca covered the pendants with a shiny paint.

 

These are the tools the students used to make their clay pendants.

 

Students made gift bags by sponge printing over a stencil. They decorated with metallic markers.

 

When I prepared the clay, I made slabs by cutting the clay with a wire clay cutter. I saved the slabs between sheets of plastic. Every student was given one-half of a slab to roll into a thinner pancake.

 

3rd Grade Non-Objective Paintings Video

3rd Grade Non-Objective Paintings Video

Watch the Video .

3rd Grade: Painting with Tints and Shades

4th Grade Related Color Trees

4th Grade students are learning about the 12 color Color Wheel throughout the year. For this lesson, they learned that related colors are colors that touch on the color wheel. Another name for related colors is analogous colors. 

Students practiced drawing trees in their sketchbooks. Next they practiced painting trees with black paint. The idea was to practice making trees with wide trunks, thinner limbs and increasingly smaller branches as they grew upward. 

For the final project, they drew a tree with branches that extended off the edges of the paper. They painted the trees black. Then they blended 2 related colors of oil crayon in each space that was created. The trees are abstract. Real trees in our neighborhood have many more branches and twigs. We simplified by leaving out details.  

See more art work from this project here. 

1st Grade Used Observation to Draw Leaves with Bamboo Pens

Students learned how to dip the bamboo pen into the India ink. They looked carefully at the outside edge of the leaves. No tracing. They added veins that they saw in the leaves. 

3rd Grade Masks

Third graders are working on their mask projects. We looked at masks from around the world. We discussed how the masks were made by people in oral cultures. These cultures used storytelling, ritual and ceremonies to convey their stories before they had a written language. We reviewed symmetrical balance before painting our mask shapes with black paint. The paint, fold and blot method keeps everything symmetrical.

Students draw in their sketchbooks if they finish a step early. 

Some students paint while others sketch in their sketchbooks.

The next step is to add patterns with oil crayons. Then they cut out the masks and make them 3-D. To finish, they add embellishments with beads, buttons, yarn, raffia and other goodies.

Third Grade Works with Tints and Shades

Third Grade looked at the Blue Period paintings of Pablo Picasso. He used one color to paint these sad paintings. When an artist uses one color and many tints and shades of that color we call it a monochromatic painting. Third Grade learned that mixing white with a color made tints. Tints are lighter values of a color. When you add black you make a shade. Shades are a darker value of a color. 

Students selected a shape and painted that shape with many tints of one color. Then they repeated the shape with many shades of that color. 

Students who used orange or yellow used brown to make shades. Brown paint looks better with these colors than black. 

Some students made many shapes. 

Students adding tints and shades to their backgrounds.

They looked at the non-objective paintings of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. 

When the students' shapes dried, they cut them into pieces and arranged them on a background paper. They chose the same color or a new color to paint the rest of the painting with tints and shades. 

Student Paintings:

More paintings are here on Artsonia. 

2nd Grade Mural with Media Experiments

I can use art media in a variety of ways.

2nd Graders explored art media like scientists. Which ones will smear? Which ones will blend? What happens if you paint over oil crayons? What happens if you paint water over pencil? Over marker? Which media can you use to make secret writing?

Mural on display at Sherman Elementary

We cut media experiments into circles. We mixed them up and glued them onto a colored paper. Looking carefully, we put light next to dark or bright next to dull for an interesting combination. We cut these circles into quarters. We glued them back into whole circles. This was truly a collaborative art project!

5th Grade: Chinese Landscapes or Shan shui (Chinese: 山水 lit. "mountain-water")

For our 5th Grade cultural unit, we learned about the art of a different culture.

Essential questions for this unit include:
"How is traditional Chinese painting different than how we are used to painting?"
"How can I combine brushstrokes to form images from nature?"

Practicing value in different media is a core part of the 5th grade curriculum. Value connects with the Renaissance and realism. Value changes are one way to make a work of art look realistic. The I can statement for this unit was “I can use bamboo brushes and make a landscape using various values of black and gray.”

 First the students practiced four types of brushstrokes: 

1. thin;
2. thin-thick-thin;
3. thick-thin and
4. thin-thick.

Next they looked at landscape elements in Chinese landscape paintings and practiced making them on newsprint.

They watched a video by The Helpful Art Teacher to learn about parts of a Chinese landscape including, the heart, paths and the threshold.

After practicing, they made their good landscape painting using sumi ink on white paper. They framed their pieces to look like an oriental scroll. The final step was to design a chop and carve the design onto a foam block. They used the chop to sign their artwork on the front using red block printing ink.

 

To see more art works from this project visit Artsonia here. Students are taking their own pictures, but class time is short and we run out of time to do them all. If you want to volunteer to take photos for Artsonia, please contact me.

 

Kindergarten: Dots and Kandinsky

In Kindergarten, we are learning to handle different art materials. We read the book,The Dot. We looked at a painting by Wassily Kandinsky. We made dots and circles with oil crayons. We painted with watercolor paint.

See more results here in Artsonia. We will add more to Artsonia as time permits. If you want to volunteer to take photos for Artsonia, please contact me.

1st Grade: Ndebele Inspired Geometric Paintings

We read My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Me by Maya Angelou. The Ndebele women from South Africa paint their houses with geometric shapes. They use a chicken feather to paint. First graders painted geometric shapes and lines. Then they added textures by rubbing over bumpy things with oil crayons. Finally they printed patterns over the top. We learned about the art elements of line, shape, color and texture.

See more results here in Artsonia. We will add more to Artsonia as time permits. If you want to volunteer to take photos for Artsonia, please contact me.

Student printing patterns on top of painting.

Students worked in their Art Elements Workbooks when they finished painting for the day. 

5th Grade: Zentangle Mandalas

Fifth graders started the year making mandalas and filling in the spaces with doodled designs called zentangles.

First they watched a video of Buddhist Monks making a mandala with colored sand. Several years ago, these monks came to Eau Claire and made a mandala at the university. I showed them this video of the monks making a similar mandala: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA3su0ECdPc 

Questions we thought about included:

Why do they destroy it in the end? Is it art if they destroy it?

The students then chose to make geometric or free form mandalas. Many were enthusiastic about the geometry associated with circles. The flower mandala was popular.

We filled the sections with repeated patterns to create unity and interest. The doodled designs are called zentangles. We have several zentangle books and the internet is a great source for zentangle doodle designs. Watching the speed drawing videos on YouTube is fun and inspirational. The students did not even know at first that they were making different values with their patterns. Densely drawn patterns create darker patterns while less dense patterns appear lighter. It is a fancy way of using cross hatching to create pattern. We will look at many ways to create value this year.

See more results here in Artsonia. We will add more to Artsonia as time permits. If you want to volunteer to take photos for Artsonia, please contact me.