Kindergarten
Kindergarten EYES are done and will be hanging in the hallways shortly to watch at the Halloween costumes walk by! We are finishing up our flower paintings and adding finishing touches with lines and patterns. Meanwhile, we read the book "The Very Last Castle" to help introduce our next set of lesson on castles, kings, queens and dragons! Students began drawing their castles using what they know about lines to make shapes like squares, rectangles, circles and triangles and we even practiced the most difficult castle line!
1st Grade
Our colorful multi-sized craft sticks have been glued down into all sorts of house sizes and styles! What imaginative architects we have in 1st grade! We just finished adding details such as doors, windows and chimneys with metallic color pencils! This week we are ready to move onto our next lesson!
2nd grade
Our Sky Color skies have been painted and this week we worked on painting papers for our Egyptian desert land. We used the leftover brown paint from our cave animals; added white and yellow and a bit of red to make it desert color and painted a full paper using the back of our brush to scratch in some texture. In the next few classes we will be ripping up our painted paper into sections to glue down for our land and adding pyramids and camels to finish off our Egyptian landscapes!
3rd grade
We are going dot crazy! Third grade has really been impressing me this week with their focus and attention to detail as they add their MANY dots to the Yayoi Kusama inspired pumpkins we have drawn. This week we work on stems (with even more dots) and backgrounds.
4th grade
Students finished their watercolor backgrounds and are now designing their own cities. This week city drawings will be transferred to a piece of styrofoam that will be used to learn the printmaking process. Foam cities will be inked and printed onto their sky section of their watercolor paper. We will fold the paper in half so the city then transferred to the water part for the reflection! Students will also be introduced to the artist James Rizzi and see how he transforms cityscapes into cities that are alive!
5th grade
Fifth graders have cut out a collection of bottles in different sizes and shapes. We will then create an interesting arrangement of the bottles and add shading to them with colored pencil, pencil and vine charcoal. Students will learn how to add a cast shadow onto their table surface before gluing everything down.
6th grade
As our animal portraits are coming together we took a class time last week to learn about the Kente Cloth designs from Ghana. We are using the designs from Kente Cloth to create patterns in the background of our animal portraits. After the animals have all been glued together more designs will be added to them before we can complete this multi-media artwork!
Kindergarten
This week Kindergarten students will be revisiting their coffee filter "dots" that we made the very first days of art. We will be turning them into the iris of a large colorful eye! Students will be practicing their scissor skills by cutting out long eyelashes to make their eyes look wide open! Additionally, kinders have started turning their lines into shapes to make flower drawings that they are painting with the primary colors as well as mixing them together to make orange and purple!
1st Grade
Students have been looking at the work of Beverly Buchanan, an African-American artist whose works include painting, sculpture, video and land art. She is noted for her exploration of Southern vernacular architecture through her art. First graders will be making their own color shacks out of different sized craft sticks that they have just finished painting with bright colors and patterns.
2nd grade
Cave art comes to an end with an exciting hand print signature! Students "signed" their work just like the cave artists by placing their hand on their "wall" and getting it sprayed with paint leaving their hand print outline. We now move onto Egypt and hav been looking at Egyptian landscapes that include beautiful colored skies, desserts, pyramids, and camels! 2nd graders were read the story Sky Color by Peter Reynolds. Students learned that the sky can be many different colors besides blue.
3rd grade
Fish are now finished and students began learning about the artist Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama is a fascinating artist who, in her 90s, is still making art today and works with the themes of infinity and repetition. She uses dots on many different types of surfaces. Students were read a book about Yayoi Kusama's life and work. Kusama's most popular works of art depicts the pumpkin filled with dots. Students began to draw a Kusama-esque pumpkin and will fill it with different sized dots to show light and dark. Students will also learn about other cultures in different parts of the world that use dots as an important part of their art making.
4th grade
Landscapes are wrapping up and are just lovely, even the mini practice landscapes have turned into lovely works of art. Students are now looking at other types of "scapes" including cityscapes, specifically cityscapes that are reflected onto a body of water. Students will paint a sky and water with liquid watercolors and then draw their own city scape onto a piece of foam that will be used as a printmaking "plate" to print onto their sky and reflect onto the water.
5th grade
Students continue exploring how to create values of lights and darks within an artwork. Their jellyfish artworks used value to create an underwater ocean environment that goes from light to dark to show depth. Fifth graders will now learn how to make a still life and shade their still live objects to look three-dimensional. Most students have just started cutting out their perfectly symmetrical bottles, vases, and cups by folding a piece of paper in half, drawing one side of the object and then cutting it out from the folded paper. Students looked at still life paints by Cezanne.
6th grade
Our African animal portrait projects are making progress. Most students have successfully cut out all their animal portrait parts and have begun painting the individual shapes. The shapes will then be glued together and designs with metallic and black Sharpies will be added. African patterns will be added to their brightly painted sunset/sunrise skies before the animal head is glued down. Students have also been working on finishing their sketchbook covers and putting together their sketchbooks for future projects.
