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!

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.

Matisse Still Life

This lesson was taken from Phyl. Her students' paintings turned out so phenomenally. I was excited about the lesson with my fourth and fifth graders. And then, things weren't going so well. Either students weren't mixing any colors or they ignored my directions of mixing the colors NEXT to each other on the color wheel, which of course became mud. The more we worked on them, the worse they seemed to be. So, I gave up. We started our clay projects and moved on.

Then, I pulled them out to grade. I realized that, more than anything, they just weren't finished. We pulled the paints back out for one final day of painting. Much better. I think we all needed to step back from them a bit. Maybe the kids were bored. Maybe I was bored. This time, I also emphasized outlining items with black.

And the rest on exhibit in the hall. We have these boards above the kids' lockers for display. It's kind of weird to me looking UP to the work, but at least the kids do not have their hands on them.