Georgia O'Keeffe Suncatchers

This project was thanks to a post I found on Mrs. Taylor's Artopolis. It was one of the most complimented projects that we did this year and also one of the easiest!

Thanks to the generous nature of my faculty, I have a large supply of overhead transparencies. With the advent of smart boards, classroom teachers are not using them anymore, so lucky me.... I get all of the leftovers (and save a bundle in my budget in the process!).

I gave each of my PreK students a transparency and a black Sharpie. They wrote their name on the transparency and then returned them to me. I gave each of them a bottle of glue (another supply that I have in large amounts, thanks to my faculty) and showed them how to squirt a large blog of glue onto the transparency (making sure not to go over the edge).

Then the PreK assistant and myself walked around with squirt bottles of food coloring (red, yellow and blue) and squirted 2 drops of each color onto the glue.

I showed the students how to use the handle of a paintbrush to swirl the colors around in the glue. This confused some of them, since we had just learned how to use the paintbrush the right way. The next time I do this with my students, I believe that I will try giving them toothpicks or popsicle sticks to avoid this confusion. Another ah-ha moment, which I will fix next time, is that  when I squirted the 3 primary colors onto their glue, they had a very difficult time knowing when to STOP swirling, so many of them got muddy. Those that had the control to stop, turned out beautiful. Next time- either warm or cool colors.

I placed these onto the drying rack to dry (they actually took 2 days to dry all the way through).

For the next class, the students took a black Sharpie and traced around the outside of their glue, giving them a guide to follow for cutting. They cut along their line and then the adults helped them use a hole punch to create a hole. They were given ribbon to tie through the hole. These were then hung up in the window right outside of the art room, where they caught the morning sun everyday.

After a few days, the transparency began peeling off of the glue. I'm wondering if it might work better if we went ahead and peeled it off completely before adding the ribbon.

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Tall Tales Summer Program- Day 1

We started our summer program today. The book for today was Too Much Glue by Jason Lefebvre. 

Not only did the children love this book (predicting what was going to happen to Matty next), but the parents enjoyed it, too. I have a feeling it reminded them of their little ones.

After reading the book, we broke off into our three groups and began making art.

Our first project was a glue shirt. I found this idea at Painted Paper. I had a pattern for the children to trace onto a piece of paper. They cut out the shirt and then folded the shirt in half. They painted on 1 side and then created a print by refolding the paper. Then they decorated the shirts with yarn and hole punches, sequins, foam shapes, scrapbook paper and any other random materials we could find.

Our second project was a "stick puppet", which I found at K-6 Art. They started out by gluing precut pieces of corrugated cardboard onto a large piece of paper. Some of the students got creative and cut their cardboard into the shapes that they wanted. They decorated these with buttons, sequins, yarn, scrapbook paper, tissue paper, and any other materials that they could think of.

The last project that the student worked on was a self-portrait (Pinterest). They cut out a body from a large piece of paper. It was decorated with a variety of materials. While they were working on this, the teacher walked around and took a picture close-up picture of each child. These were printed out and then glued onto the bodies. I only got 1 picture because these took a little longer to complete.

The students were able to complete all 3 projects in a 2 hour time period (with the help of their parent/caregiver, the high school volunteers and 3 teachers).

For our first day..... 60-70 children plus adults! Tomorrow's book.... Zonk, The Dreaming Tortoise by David Hoobler.

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Prekinder Shape Self-Portraits

For my precious little 4 year olds, we started the year by doing a self-portrait. Now for the majority of these students, this is their first exposure to any form of school. They have never used scissors, glue, markers, etc., so we are starting out very slow.

I found a great YouTube video for 3 basic shapes- square, circle and triangle. I warn you, though, it will be stuck in your head for the entire day.....


Then I showed them how to make a self-portrait using shapes (circle, triangle, square and rectangle). The goal of this was exposing them to using glue, so I demonstrated the "just a dot, not a lot" mantra.

For the next class, they used crayons to add eyes, nose, mouth, hair, and any other details that they wanted to add in.

This little one has his arms raised over his head...

 Another one with his arms in the air.

Love the feet on this one.

 She wanted to make ears, so the only shape that worked for her were the triangles.

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First Grade Gaudi Towers

This one came from the May 2011 issue of Arts and Activities.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to try it out.  When I became the art teacher at my school, I inherited TONS of large cardboard spools. They were perfect for this project!

We started out by looking at a variety of images of Antoni Gaudi's sculptures. The students loved them! They were unlike any other scultpure they had seen previously.

Then I gave each student a spool and a black marker. I had them draw lines onto the spool with the marker. They chose what kind of lines they wanted- we had lots of straight and zig zag.

Here is were I adapted the project from the original. In the original, it has the entire spool covered in air dry clay. With over 100 students working on this project, that was not a cost-effective way to do this. So what we did, was I had they students cover only their lines with air dry clay.

 They would add glue to a small section of their line and then roll out a piece of air dry clay to about the size of their pinkie finger. They glued this onto the spool. Then they took old broken crayons that I had been collecting and broke them into small pieces and glued those on top of the clay.

They had to cover all of the lines that they had drawn with the black marker, using clay and crayons.

Once this was finished, we got out the cheese graters.

We had a lesson on how to use the graters safely, so that no fingers got injured and they used them to grate crayons to create "sprinkles".

They spread glue onto the areas of the spool that did not have clay and then sprinkles the grated crayons on.

The last step was to create a 3 dimensional form for the top of their tower.

We brainstormed a list of 3D forms: cube, sphere, cone, cylinder (I tried to stick with forms that they were currently using in math).

I gave them clay and they made their form and glued it onto the top of their tower. Then they were allowed to decorate them with crayons and sprinkles.

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PreKinder Navajo Blankets

My PreK classes are learning how to make lines, so I decided to incorporate that into a lesson on Navajo blankets.

I prefolded black paper and had them use construction paper crayons to draw the lines dividing each section.

In the middle of their paper, I had them write the first letter of their name (I had cards written up for those who are still learning the letters in their names) and draw a circle around it.

Then they made a different line in each different section on their paper- using as many different colors as they wanted.

I made colored "sand" for them. I did this by using white cornmeal, rubbing alcohol and food coloring, all shaken together and let dry. The colors that I got out of this were so bright!

For this next step, we moved outside- I didn't want my room 

filled with colored "sand".

The students traced their lines with glue and then sprinkled the colored "sand" onto the glue. The PreK teacher, assistant and myself helped them pour the excess back into the containers and then they moved on to the next line.

This actually took us 3 class times (I only see them for about 25-30 minutes), but they look so bright in the hallway, it was worth it!

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Kindergarten Self-Portraits

After we did the last lesson with shapes, we moved into a project where we created a self-portrait. Except for this self-portrait, we used die-cut shapes. I had a parent volunteer fill a plastic container with small die-cut shapes. I also had her cut large ovals and circles that the students could use for their heads.

We started out by gluing on the head. We figured out where the best spot would be to glue it. Most of them figured out the gluing it in the middle of the paper would not be the best spot, that gluing it near the top would work better. At this point, I also reminded them that they were to use glue dots so that their paper would not end up full of glue.

Once they had their head glued on, they used the other shapes to add their body, arms, legs, fingers, feet, eyes, etc.

They were not allowed to use pencils, crayons or scissors at all. This was very difficult for many of them. I kept finding some of them trying to sneak in a crayon or reaching for the scissors. This was a new way for them to look at themselves and the shapes that make up our bodies.

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Fifth Grade Schapiro's Shapes

Materials Needed

• sketchbooks
• watercolor paper
• watercolors/brushes
• fadeless construction paper/neon paper
• glue
• scissors
"High Stepping Strutter"- Miriam Schapiro
"Free Falling"- Schapiro

"Anna and David"- Schapiro

We started the project by looking at a variety of artworks by Miriam Schapiro, focusing on her pieces that used the human figure. We took notice of the use of space and how the figure takes up the entire space. We talked about different actions that we could demonstrate with our figures: running, cheerleading, basketball, ballet, etc. and what positions the different parts of the body would be in.
The students used the wooden manikins that I have in my room to draw 2 figures, each showing a different motion. They had to think about the proportion of the different body parts and what position they should be in. Would the leg be perfectly straight or slightly bent?

When they finished these, we looked at the artwork of Jackson Pollock and talked about how he created some of his more well-known pieces. Then they did a quick splatter paint background using liquid watercolors (my new favorite! I have given up using the pan watercolors- we go through them too quickly and the colors are not nearly as vibrant). I showed them how to control the splatter by tapping their paint brush onto their other hand. By doing this, we had a minimum of clean up. I let them use as many colors as they wanted and the backgrounds turned out to be works of art in themselves.

I had the students make an origami envelope for the next part. They used this to hold all of the pieces that they cut. I asked them to cut out all of their pieces and put their person together first without doing any gluing. That way they could make sure that they had the right proportions, colors, placement, etc. They stored their pieces inside of their envelope for the next class.

When they had all of their pieces ready, they began gluing everything down onto their splatter paper. They used all of the scrap pieces (we didn't throw anything away!) to cut out decorations. I had hole punches on hand for them to use, they cut zig zags, etc. I basically told them to go CRAZY with the decorations.

They ended up looking amazing and we used these to move into a 3D project where the students made a plastercraft sculpture of their figure.

Vocabulary:


space, proportion, movement Pin It