Texture Painting Update

     I've posted about texture paintings before, but I did these ones a little differently this year.  I did them in conjunction with slab knee bowls.  For these ones, the 1st graders started with copy paper and texture rubbing plates and crayons.  They really just experimented with the plates and some kids colored designs or patterns, and some just did blobs of different textures and colors.  Then they made resists by painting watercolors over the crayon textures.

     We glued the paintings to bigger pieces of construction paper to make frames.  I gave each kid a chunk of Model Magic and they broke it into small pieces that they stuck to the edges of the construction paper.  Like my other texture paintings, the kids used items from their art boxes to make different textures in the Model Magic.  A few pieces fell off here and there as the Model Magic dried, and the kids just glued them back where they belonged!  When the Model Magic was dry, they painted over it with Biggie Cake temperas.  I had them paint black lines at the edges of their resists to add a little emphasis, and they were done!

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Leadership Group Coil Pots

As I've mentioned before, our school has started focusing on leadership with our students, and we have started leadership clubs this year.  The students have been divided into groups with varying grade levels based on different areas of interest.  My group is called "Clay Kids" (15 kids), and we make functional ceramic artwork.

I am SO excited about these coil pots that the kids made.  We planted marigold seeds in them, and they are growing and doing great!  I've never grown flowers from seeds, and I am definitely enjoying having them in my room!  Hopefully they will continue to do well!

The coil pots were a challenge for the younger kids, but the older ones were wonderful mentors for them, and everyone had made one by the end of our club time!  We started with small balls of clay that the kids squished and worked with their hands to create round little slabs.  I had them use slip (which I don't usually do in a full class of  elementary aged kids) to help the coils adhere.  We still had some issues with construction though, and some of the pots ended up being a little shorter than their artist intended.

I poked holes in the bottoms of the pots with a straw once they had begun to dry a little, and the kids glazed them after they were bisqued.  On the club day that we planted the seeds, the students made the little popsicle stick flowers while they were waiting for their turn to plant their seeds.  I told the kids that I have never grown flowers from seeds before, and we wanted to be sure to have at least one flower in case the seed growing didn't go so well!

  

 

Kindergarten Starry Nights

     I needed a landscape project for kindergarten, so I came up with this van Gogh inspired lesson and am really happy with how they turned out.  The kindergartners loved learning about van Gogh and liked his thick paint strokes.  We tried to make broken lines on blue or turquoise paper with various kinds of media including oil pastels, glitter liquid watercolors, and metallic watercolors.  This lesson provided a nice opportunity to talk about horizon lines, and that objects and people need to be grounded on or below them in landscapes.  Because we drew the landscapes on separate (black) paper and then cut them out, the students were really forced to have objects touch the ground. 

     I love including photographs of the kids in their projects, and we just tossed them in because we thought it would be neat to actually BE in Starry Night and to really see a wild sky like that!