Kindergarten Self-Portraits


SOOOOO much learning went into these self-portraits.  Kinders have been learning about texture, color mixing, collage, and drawing from observation.  Here's how we did it:
Day one we read this book about all the beautiful, different colors of us:

We talked about how everyone is the same but different and we learned how to mix a color for us using brown, white, yellow, and pink.  We painted an entire page our color.
Day two we talked about texture and mixed two colors to make a new color for our background. We used texture combs to draw lines in our wet paint and give our backgrounds texture.
Day three we practiced looking VERY CLOSELY at our faces with a mirror. We cut out an oval and drew our features with an oil pastel, paying close attention to our eyes.  We learned that there are three parts to our eyes, the white part, the iris (colored part), and a black pupil.
Day four we cut out a neck and ears from the rest of our skin color paper and assembled our portrait on our background. We cut out a shirt from construction paper.  At this point we looked very funny because we were all BALD!
Day five we used markers to add in some details to our shirts and then we broke out the paints again. We used brown, yellow, black, white, and red to mix a color for our hair. We talked about how everyone's hair color is unique, just like our skin.  We also practiced different types of lines for different types of hair, curly, straight, spiky, etc.

Whew, there you have it! I love how expressive each and every one of these are.

Magritte Eyes

Third graders learned about Magritte and surrealism.  We read these books to learn a bit about them:

The book 'If', by Sarah Perry, is a great one to introduce the concept of surrealism to kids.  Each page poses one surrealistic idea like,  'If fish were leaves'  and is accompanied by incredible illustrations. I had the kiddos write their own 'if's' and illustrate them as an intro.  Next we looked at many paintings by Magritte and Dali.  We read 'Dinner at Magritte's' and the Mike Venezia biography of Magritte.
Here are some of the paintings and sculptures we looked at:


Using Magritte's painting, 'The False Mirror' as inspiration we chose a piece of patterned paper to make the iris of our own surreal eyes. Using mirrors we drew our own eyes and we practiced shading with oil pastels.  Our eyes:

(and then there was this awesome one:)

Printed Butterflies


Second grade kiddos made these amazing butterflies after learning a bit about the Monarch, the king of all butterflies.  We learned that monarchs migrate to Mexico for the winter, and because of climate change, over-forestation, and icky pesticides many Monarchs are dying.  Knowledge is power, and we made these to celebrate the beauty of butterflies, and also to let people know about this issue.  
In making these we also learned a bit about symmetry and a LOT about printing.  We used really watery tempera paint to paint one side of our butterfly. We folded our papers to print the lines as we painted.  After they dried we reviewed analogous colors and talked about blending.  We used chalk pastels to color them, trying to keep our butterflies symmetrical. Thank you Cassie Stephens for the inspiration for this project!

Earth and Space Abstracts

Seriously, what's cooler than space?  I have been in awe of the photos Commander Kelly has been taking from the ISS and posting on social media lately, so when I saw this post from Don Masse, I just knew I had to copy, uhh I mean borrow, this idea.  My third graders were FASCINATED by Commander Kelly and my lessons ended up running at least an extra 10 minutes answering all their questions about astronauts, space, and gravity (and writing down a bunch of questions to look up answers to later :)  When I was able to get down to the nitty-gritty of my demo I mostly focused on how to use chalk.  This was third graders first foray into the messy, but super pigment-y, wonders of chalk. I showed them how to hold the chalk so they don't drag their palms across their paper, how to blend colors using just the tip of their finger, and how to make different types of marks to show different textures. Kids chose one of Commander Kelly's photos to use as inspiration.  We spoke about really zooming-in to just one part of the picture and off they went.  Kids did an awesome job and I think these are really incredible all put together. :)
  

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!