A Fresh Art Room

At a recent meeting of EAT (elementary art teachers), several teachers had pictures of their rooms to share on their phones. Alas, I did not - I have an ancient phone. But I do have a camera! So I took a picture of one wall of my clean-for-now art room.

This may seem compulsive, but I like to sort the scraps. I have a box for each color, rainbow order (of course), under my whiteboard at the front of the room. When the kids have big pieces of scrap, they can clean as they go and put it right where it belongs. When we're doing collage and other mixed media, it's so easy for them to find just the right piece! And, the child who's finished early and can't focus on an independent project can totally enjoy sorting scraps from a giant bag. It's working for me, give it a try!

Show us pictures of your room - we all want to see!

Graffiti

I set up a paint table at the back of the room and called 4 or 5 kids back at a time to spraypaint their newspaper. I just tore the newspaper into quarter sections and let the kids pick what they wanted. I tried to pull out the obits and the funnies. The funnies look good, but I didn't want to have kids squabbling over them. I should have demonstrated what to do with the spray paint
(watercolor in a spray bottle) and showed the kids where to put their paper to dry before I did the rest of the lesson. This would have left me free to help more with their graffiti tag art and not have to supervise the paint table. Now I know. We weren't trying to spraypaint a message, just get some color on the newspaper.

Before they could start their letters, we measured the paper and marked the center. Then we wrote our names (whatever they were using for their tag) in the upper corner of the paper, counted the letters, and put the middle letter in the center of the paper. (They should know how to do this so their posters and book reports turn out better too). I showed them how to do simple block letters and let them make them outrageous (arrows, flames, etc...) I emphasized that graffiti is bold so letters should be nice and fat, and they should touch or overlap. I also showed them how to do a drop shadow - they really like that part although it's hard. I have a ton of scratch paper that I've saved from the other teachers and this is what we used to do our art. This worked very well for this type of activity, then the kids felt free to keep trying and practicing until they got it right.

This took two lessons, some students had a lot a free time during the second lesson. I let them free draw. I also reminded them that they could add other grafftiti elements to their newspaper - there is plenty of room. And some kids did keep embellishing it. I didn't say no guns or gang symbols, I just waited to see what they did and I never had to tell a student that theirs was inappropriate. H. Corin

Color Wheel Balloons

Well here are the Thomas Crossroads Color Wheel Balloons. I was trying to find an interesting way to teach color wheel to 2nd grade and I had recently seen some great hot air balloons which gave me this idea. After much discussion about hot air balloons, the color wheel, and shapes we began our first sketches in pencil. Then they had to make some decisions. Two of the balloons had to be divided into 3rds and one had to be divided into 6ths, they could do this any way they chose. One balloon was to be painted in primary colors, one balloon was to be painted in secondary colors and one balloon with both. The tricky part was that they had to create all the secondary colors using only primary colors and mixing them right on the page.

Winter Trees

I totally borrowed this lesson from Deep Space Sparkle - she has great ideas there! I did this with 2nd - 5th and it worked for all ages. I offered them pink, purple, light blue, or dark blue paper choices. We talked about how each color reminds us of different times of the day and different kinds of weather. We discussed landscape characteristics - ground touches the sky, things far away are lighter and smaller than things up close (atmospheric perspective), and we talked about trees. Trees are widest at their trunks and get skinnier as they grow up. We painted this together - like a guided drawing but a guided painting instead. Lots of fun and only one day!
SUPPLIES: 9 x 12 construction paper, paint: white, light gray, dark gray, black.
STEP 1:
Paint in a horizon line (at least halfway up the paper) and fill the ground with snow. Practice using nice brushstrokes.
STEP 2:
Paint background trees first - use lightest gray, the trunks start on top of horizon line, take the trees off the edge of paper.
STEP 3:
Paint mid-ground trees - used dark gray, trunks start in middle of snow, trees can overlap the background and go off edge.
STEP 4:
Paint fore-ground trees - use black, start near bottom of paper, go off the edge at the top.
LAST:
Add fun stuff - show kids how to make dot snowflakes with paintbrush handle, make a snowman or woodland creature. The 4th & 5ths were very interested in fences.

Jim Dine Hearts

There's no forgetting what's on the kid's minds this week so I though some "heart art" would be fun. Making hearts cool and not sissy is sometimes a challenge and I think Jim Dine's work is a great example of cool and fun. Since we'll be out of school next week for winter break, I wanted the kids to complete this in one day, so we used collage and paint to fill our papers. Students got to choose their background paper color and then we took a sheet of white copy paper, learned how to fold and draw half a heart, cut it out and voila! I was surprised at how many older students didn't know this trick. After gluing the white heart onto the colored paper, we then collaged tissue paper on the heart and some background. Some kids liked keeping the collage on the heart only. The last thing was some paint pizzazz! I let them bring their art to a paint table and they could squeeze paint onto their art to give it something special. As always, no words or numbers - this is art not a valentine. Some art got a little heavy and soggy, but for the most part they turned out very cool and the kids had fun. - H. Corin

Forsythia Blossoms

Spring comes early in Georgia, so I'm posting this now while it's cold in anticipation of beautiful days. I did this with my kinders last spring. I asked for old wallpaper books at the local builder supply store and they gave me an armload. Any paper will work for the vase, but I like the look of wallpaper for this. I gave the kids a pattern to trace for the vase and we traced, cut and glued together. Then I demonstrated how to draw the long stems of the forsythia. Next, we used dots of glue and placed small wads of yellow tissue for the blossoms. The last thing is signing our names to the bottom right, "because we're proud of our art". This was a fun, one day art lesson. - H. Corin