Clay redo

Another lesson repeat was these clay fish by first graders. I've seen them on a few sites where they made them with pinch pots. For ours, we used a clay slab or pancake wrapped around newspaper.

The students added texture to the fish and painted the clay with watercolor after firing.

Kindergarteners tend to flatten their clay no matter what you are making with them. I just go for the flattening instinct and have students make clay masks. This student didn't add a lot of clay, but kept nice details through drawing and, again, painting with watercolor.

Clay cupcakes

I've seen this lesson on probably half a dozen blogs this year.  I loved the idea and decided to do the same lesson this semester with my third graders. We had a few bottoms get a little squished during storage, so some of them don't fit as nicely together. I will definitely do this lesson again, but do a few more teacher checks on them. I don't have glaze at my school this semester, so we painted these with acrylic paint. Some of the paint has a nice sheen, so they were really using that to make them sparkle! The students were so proud of their work, and so was I!

Gyotaku again

Since I'm an art teacher at two schools, one for a semester each, I planned to just repeat the lessons that I did the first semester in the second. I'm always finding such interesting new lessons, so I ended up changing quite a bit anyway. Some lessons I changed just because of time of the year (Van Gogh sunflowers didn't really fit in February.)

 One lesson I did both semesters was fish printing or gyotaku. It was just such a big hit with my students and so very out of the ordinary for their experience that I decided to do the printing again, but I printed with all grades this time.

Last semester, they printed on white paper and just left the clean print. This semester students printed on construction paper (I had plenty of construction paper, but not so much white) and then added a background. I loved some of their creative ideas. I've seen others add the background first, but I liked to have the students totally in the dark about the fact that we were printing with fish.

Again, this was so much fun! It also felt like a bit of a (busy) break from what has been a pretty stressful year.

Hot Dogs and Cool Cats

Another "stolen" lesson idea, this time from Joanna. I loved her "Hot Dogs and Cool Cats" color lesson. The kids really understood the warm/cool concept after this painting.

I did this lesson with Pre-K through 1st grade. Though I got the best results from 1st grade, they turned out pretty nicely with the younger grades as well. Thanks for the lesson!

Rethinking

These are just a few samples of our oil pastel drawings from February. (Yes, from February.) I used a couple of tried and true lessons that were just turning out not so great. Fourth grade (above) studied Minnie Evans, and were creating drawings with symmetry.

Second and third grade studied Faith Ringgold and were creating oil pastel versions of story quilts.

On both of these kids just seemed to be almost scribbling. For the most part, I consider oil pastels to be a near win on every project. I love them. These were mostly turning out flat. I just stacked them up and didn't look at them for awhile. Looking back at them, they aren't quite as bad as I had originally thought. However, this is another case in point for me to use portfolios to keep art. The kids (besides the ones I'm showing you) could definitely have saved their drawings with another look.