Our Collaborative Alphabet!
First graders worked alongside fourth grade kiddos to make these amazing alphabet collages! The firsties made the collaged animals and objects and my awesome art teaching partner-in-crime, Danielle, worked with her fourth graders to design the letters and words. It was a collaborative effort all around! These will be hung up all around the school for the whole next year.  Here they all are:

Pre-Kinders bring Matisse to Life



Pre-Kinders learned all about Matisse. We read these books to learn a bit about him:


After a scissors demo ( I usually sing a silly song I made up about keeping your thumb on the top and your elbow glued to your side) kids attacked some construction paper to make these beauties:


As we were working we were thinking about what our picture reminded us about.  I think this kiddo might've told a story about a frog in a pond: (side note- this pre-k kiddo has some seriously awesome scissor skillz)


After finishing up these (more traditional) Matisse collages I wanted the kiddos to really explore some of Matisse's organic shapes.  I have two Pre-k classes, so each class looked at one of these Matisse collages:

We talked about what we saw and what the shapes made us think about. Then each kiddo got a piece of model magic to make either a leaf-shape or a star-shape.  Kids got to choose where their shape was glued down.


These are our finished 3-D Matisse Masterpieces!

Collaborative Paper Quilts


This is a very belated post. It only took two feet of snow and a weekend stuck inside to write it :) To kick off the year back in October, Kindergarteners through third graders completed a collaborative project completely inspired by the awesome quilts of Libs Elliott and this post from shine brite zamorano.  What is that quote? Good artist borrow, great ones steal. (thanks shine brite!) To see how we did it check out his awesome blog.