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