Pop Art Picnic

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...