Second Grade Framed Portraits

Second grade students studied the portraits of Frida Kahlo. Students created their self portraits with glue  line printmaking.

Students created their prints in a few different colors. After completing the prints, they chose their favorite and created a frame, with designs in oil pastel.

Printmaking is one of my favorites. Students find so much success!

You can see more of these prints in our Artsonia gallery.

This worked for me! Tessellations

This lesson is from a couple of months ago, but it was highly successful. I taught tessellations years ago, but the way I did it was very confusing. Confusing for me, even more so for my students. I don't know why I didn't think of doing it with an equilateral triangle where mirror images complete the image. When I saw this idea back in September from Artful, Artsy, Amy, I was also desperate for lessons that used the supplies I had. Copy paper and markers were perfect for this 5th grade lesson. I used the hand out that Amy posted. As you can see from these examples, even less than perfect examples turned out pretty nice. You can see even more tessellations from our Artsonia gallery.

The one thing that I probably should have emphasized to my students was making sure that each figure was very distinct. Some of my students made robot-like figures that were difficult to put together successfully.

Thank you so much Amy for posting about this!

Artsonia?

Artsonia is definitely where I have been this year. I decided at the beginning of the year that I would publish all student work. However, it is taking up soooo much of my time.  We spend more than one class on most lessons, so it could be worse. I thought I would do this as a way to share student work with parents, grandparents, etc. I don't have that many visitors, though. I am wondering if it is worth it. What is your opinion of Artsonia? Do you use the site? If you do, what makes it worth it? How much do you upload? Do you do all of the work yourself?

Embracing Día de los Muertos

As I mentioned before I've had a hard time getting supplies this year, so much of my long term plans disappeared. I had planned on a couple of classes studying Day of the Dead, now nearly all of them all.  There was such excitement in my first class over the celebration, so now I have fully embraced it. This was a great way for many of our students to share what they do for Day of the Dead. Plus, drawing skeletons is FUN! Fortunately, the last art teacher left this skeleton. I dressed him up for drawing a couple of different ways. The last art teacher had named him Bob and said he was her boyfriend, so my 4th grade boys were very concerned about Bob in a dress. Photos of projects will be coming soon!

Sunflowers and Skies!

Not a bunch of new ideas here, but my third graders did such a great job on their sunflower drawings that I had to share. 

We looked at sunflowers (fake ones, though) both individually and in a vase. Then my students just took off with it. I think they mades some interesting choices.

Second grade also studied Van Gogh, but this time Starry Night. We compared Van Gogh's painting to different photos of our city skyline with different skies. The kids were so excited to see photos of their own city, "That's where I live!" They could create any type of sky they wanted. We had storms, sunsets and cloudy skies galore. We had some very colorful ones, and they all turned out fairly successful.

A few of my favorites.

Most of them made no attempt to follow our city skyline at all, which was perfectly fine. I think they turned out great!