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! 

Kindergarten Flower Update

     At Brimfield, we are currently working on our flower unit where we sculpt clay flowers and make a flower painting.  You can see this lesson here.  At Suffield, I usually take the kids outside and we draw the tulips in our front yard.  At Brimfield we don't have flowers like this, so I was trying to think of a solution when I ran across a great lesson from Art with Mr. E.  Instead of reading Fredrick we read a few books about spring and talked about the similarities and differences between 2D and 3D artworks.  Instead of going outside, we drew pictures of flowers that I have from old calendars and magazines and loosely followed Mr. E.'s studio process.  I love the results and thought I'd share! (We're still working on finishing the sculptures!)

Kindergarten Mary Cassatt Double Portraits

     During my last six week session at Suffield, we worked on these double portraits based on the paintings of Mary Cassatt.  Before this, we made self-portraits by drawing with a teacher-led step-by-step process.  So for these artworks, the students were challenged to draw a picture of themselves touching a special adult in their lives.  This idea is based on the many sweet mother and child paintings Cassatt did.  The students tried really hard to remember all of the necessary body parts (including necks which sometimes go forgotten in Kindergarten!), and to remember to not use stick arms or legs. 

     To finish them, the students colored small shapes with crayons and then painted to rest with watercolor paints.  We added titles at the end so our viewers would know who they were looking at!



 

Suffield Kindergarten Self-Portraits 2011-2012!

     Although I have now moved the art train over to Brimfield, I have some Suffield artwork that we finished up at the end of my 6 weeks there that I will be posting!

    I always start my kindergarten artists out with this self-portrait artwork.  It serves as a great introduction to art class because it has lots of steps that help me teach common artmaking procedures that we use over and over again.  The kindergartners learn to slow down and really focus on their drawing (we make these drawings one step at a time!), they learn how we paint in the art room (dip your brush in the water and then pull it up the side of the water bucket to get rid of excess water and don't tap!), and they learn to cut out their drawings with "white frosting" or "snow" around their black outlines so that none of their precious drawing gets snipped.  We also learn how to trace our drawings with Sharpies so they show up better and to flip our papers upside-down to better reach the top.

    We start the drawings by tracing t-shirt stencils that I made from tag board.  I always encourage students to start full-body drawings with the shirt first and then to just add the other body parts to it.  I think the t-shirt stencil really forces the kindergartners to draw big and gives everyone a strong starting point.  I will post a photo of one of the stencils when I post the portraits from Brimfield that we just started this week!



The Art of Going Home

     I can't believe it's the last day of school!  Taking down all of the artwork at the end of the year is one of my least favorite things to do because it leaves our school looking so bare and empty.  Sending the artwork home, on the other hand, is joyful!  My students make phenominal artwork and I know they are proud to take it home. 

     This year I tried to come up with a way to try to safely get some larger kindergarten artwork home.  Giant Eagle in Fairlawn was generous enough to donate paper grocery bags to us to transform into "art bags".  These bags easily hold the 18" x 24" works without folding them.  Here are some photos of some proud kindergarten artists with their art bags!



Kindergarten "Plein Air" and Ceramic Flowers

     We just finished these wonderful flowers in kindergarten.  We are SO happy to see flowers and enjoy warmer weather here in Northeast Ohio!  To get ready to sculpt these 3-dimensional flowers, each class created some "plein air" (creating artwork outside) tulip drawings in our front yard here at school.

     After drawing outside, we came back in and finished the drawings with watercolors.

                                                                                   

 

   

     For the sculptures, we used small pencils and paper clips as tools.  The students were also able to use alphabet pasta to include their names on their flowers if they wanted.  We painted the flowers with tempera paint after they were bisque fired, and then I gave them a coat each of Mod Podge for some shine!