Fifth Grade Kandinsky Musical Compositions

The first project that I had 5th grade work on this year was music inspired. The students learned about the artist Wassily Kandinsky and how he was influenced by music. We combined both of these topics and the students chose a musical instrument (I had a LOT of guitars, unfortunately) and drew it on a piece of construction paper. I encouraged them to draw it large enough so that the instrument would go off of the page.



They filled in the background using shapes that were inspired by Kandinsky artworks.

The students were given the choice of using crayons, color sticks, oil pastels or markers to color their composition in 1 color scheme (primary, secondary, complementary- a review from previous years). Some of them chose to use a combination of all of these.

I had old music books handy and the students were able to add ripped up pages of sheet music onto their background.

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PreKinder Sarah Morris Inspirations

This project came about after reading the article, "Inspired by Sarah Morris" by Barbara L. Egenes in the March 2013 Arts and Activities Magazine.

After showing my PreK students some images of Sarah Morris' contemporary artwork and discussing the lines and colors that they were able to find, we began making our own art on a piece of black construction paper.

I had pre-cut masking tape for the children and had it hanging on the edge of their tables. They used this to create their own lines and shapes. This was enough for the first day (I only see my PreK students for 30 minutes).

The next day the students came to art, I introduced them to oil pastels. I showed them how to apply pressure to get nice bright colors and to make sure that they were covering the entire space. We did not get into blending colors (some students, however, did this on their own and created some great colors).

For the last day, the students peeled their tape off of the paper. This is where I will be making adjustments in the future. The tape stuck to the black construction paper and in some cases ripped the projects. For future, I believe that I will have the students use black poster board or another sturdy paper.

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Tall Tales- The Remarkable Farkle McBride

Today's book was The Remarkable Farkle McBride by John Lithgow. None of the students had heard this book yet, so it was fun reading it to them for the first time.

Our first project of the day was building a drum out of recycled materials. The parents were asked to bring a cylindrical container for their child. We had coffee cans, juice containers, milk jugs, oatmeal containers, etc. The children used the materials that we have accumulated over the last 4 days to decorate their drums. Some of them even added to the inside of their drums so that they could not only be drums, but be maracas, as well.

The next project was one that I have seen multiple times- Kandinsky's circles. The children folded their paper into 8 sections. They used oil pastels to color and add circles. Some of the children decided they didn't want circles and they added hearts, stars and other shapes. 

Our last project of the day was an emotion painting. Each student had a canvas (11x14). There was a selection of acrylic paint, brushes and small sponges on the tables. They were asked to paint using their emotions. There was also music playing, so they were able to use the music as inspiration. The novelty of having their own canvas was inspiration enough for some of the children!

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Kinder Jasper Johns

This is a project that I have done before with kindergarten, however, in keeping with giving the students more choices and teaching them to make artistic choices for themselves, I had 3 versions of this project going at one time.

The first project started out by using tempera paint (in either warm or cool colors) to paint a folded piece of paper. Once the painting was done, they used oil pastels in the opposite color scheme to create lines in each box (wavy, zig zag, dotted, straight, etc). Then I had the letters A-H that they traced onto construction paper. They cut them out and glued them in order.

The second project used color sticks to color their paper. They used markers to create their lines and then they glue die cut letters on each square.

The third version of this project used oil pastels to color their paper, tempera paint to create their lines and then glue die cut numbers in each square.

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1st Grade Picasso's

I had such success with the first grade Picasso's last year, that I did not change the project for this year.

We looked at a variety of portraits painted by Picasso and then drew our own. The students were allowed to choose if they wanted to use liquid watercolor, oil pastels or Crayola Color Sticks.

See last year's post for more info: 2012 Picasso Portraits

Here are examples of this year's finished products:

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