Pop Art Picnic

My teen daughter actually suggested we make these this year. Can you believe that. Homemade play dough is so easy to make and so adaptable for different projects.

When I was kid I loved painting rocks. Maybe there's just something about taking something natural and making it a techno colored dream. Anyway taking a few branches and sticking them in air dry clay is so adaptable to different ages and even seasons.

This is one of my favorite projects and whenever I do a project, I've done in the past I like to tweak it a bit. This time I had students not only write things about why they liked themselves, but they asked others what are good things that other people liked about them.  I also really like this project because 5th graders are always super self-conscious about self -portraits. Well, this way using a silhouette student can do a self-portrait that looks like them but it's a little vague. One of the hardest things about this project is the concept of a profile. although I explain what a profile is, and I demonstrate and show images there is always some kid that must put 2 eyes or 2 ponytails. Long sigh, it's not the worst thing in the world.

First grade artists are practicing drawing basic geometric shapes and for many students they are learning to draw a heart for the first time. I started first by doing a whole class demonstration of the how to draw a heart. I place a dot in the middle and the bottom of the paper before class. I showed how to make a curved shape starting with your pencil on the middle dot and try to touch the side. You then repeat on the other side. This is where I talk about the word symmetry. Then you finish the heart by starting at the end of that curved line and leaning to the bottom dot. I walked around the class between steps helping students if needed. At the end of the demo I gave students about five minutes of practice time with erasers. After that I called small groups for students who needed extra assistance for their heart. While I was working with small groups I had other students work independently and draw all the shapes they could think of in the middle of their heart and color them w...

2 nd grade students made animal mask this week. They looked at images of African mask that used animals. We talked about the reasons why different people in Africa used mask in various ceremonies or celebrations. We also looked at a map of Africa, so students could realize how large Africa is. I pointed out mask of different countries. The objective was that when animals were represented in mask it was because the maker want to represent the quality or spirit of that animal. I had students choose an animal for their animal masked based on their perceived characteristic of that animal. For example, a student choose a jaguar because it was fast or a unicorn because it was magical and rare. Yeah, and I was not about to tell a kid unicorns aren’t real. This lesson was a challenge and took a lot of small group time. Some students had a harder time figuring out how to cut the negative space shapes without destroying their work. If I did this lesson again. I would tell all students to ju...

I did this art lesson with kindergarten. I came up with project after seeing lots of African cloth art lessons and wanted to include simple printing which is part of our curriculum.. I thought of jazzing up the idea a little bit more. Just creating shapes is fine if your looking for a quick 1 class art project. However I thought students could get a better idea of what fabric is for. One of the main things people design fabrics for is for clothes. HELLO! So, by having students create an outfit, draw a picture of themselves wearing it and even showing themselves outside;students were really able to show their imaginations and understand the functional aspects of these designs. There are lots of videos and images on the web for mud cloth fashions and how mud cloth is made that classes watched. I felt this project was pretty successful. The only thing I would change was to demonstrate to students that they could add more colors to their clothing with crayon. Pictures to come.

I did this art lesson last year. I thought it was very successful not only did students learn about landscapes but those different than the ones around them in the city they live in. We looked at the work of Ted Harrison a Canadian artist. I think mountain landscapes or anything with an organic shape lend itself well with glue drawing because as I told students, "it is hard to get a perfect straight line". We first talked about what a landscape is. A lot students recognized that yes the word landscape has the word land in it. So, I tried to make them understand all landscapes have a ground line or horizon line. Everything in the back is the sky, anything resting on the line in front is the ground. Students drew their art in glue and then colored in with oil pastel. Last year I used black glue. I saw a lot of art projects who used that technique. Black glue is just paint and glue mixed together. This time I decided to try just regular glue. I just didn't want ...