Artsonia

I have not been updating the blog very much lately because I have been super busy trying to get an Artsonia gallery started for my schools. I still have a lot of artwork to add and more to photograph but this is what I have so far:

http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=75872

Shoe Fish!

I did this project with a class of mostly Kindergarten students. I think I got the idea off of Kinderart. We looked at some pictures of fish and talked about basic fish anatomy. The Paras and I helped the students trace around their shoe in the middle of a 9x12 inch piece of paper. After the shoes were traced, the students added fins, a tail, gills, and a face. I liked using the shoe to get the basic shape and am going to try it to make turkeys with my Kindergarten classes this week.

After the students finished their shoe fish, they taped theirs to a piece of blue butcher paper. The first student started to draw a hook and fishing line and ended up with 3 hooks. They started going crazy with the fishing lines and really enjoyed themselves. I did not give any direction on what to draw on the butcher paper. I just put the tape on the fish so they could place it and gave them markers. The class was mostly boys so it would be interesting to see how it would turn out with more girls working on the project.

Fall Lesson Photos- and a very special drawing!

Before I talk about the photographs from recently completed primary lessons, I just had to show this drawing! One of my first grade students created this lovely picture for me, I am on the right and she is on the left. So sweet.
This is one of the Kindergarten fall projects. I was a crazy leaf lady for a couple of weeks, out late at night and early in the morning wandering the streets and yards in my neighborhood picking up different kinds and shapes and sizes of leaves. I showed the Kindergarten students how to create rubbings by putting the leaves with the veiny/bumpy side up underneath paper and rubbing a crayon sideways on top of the paper. It was hard for some students to understand holding the crayon a special new way to make it work. Students used any color they wanted and were encouraged to fill in the whole space. In the next class period, I showed the students how to put watercolor paint over the crayon to create a wax-resist. I missed a couple weeks with my Friday classes because of a workday and conferences so two classes just had the plain rubbings which I still think looked cool.
This is one of the better examples of the third grade leaf project. I job shadowed an art teacher when I was in high school and I remember her doing a project similar to this. The students traced leaves, filling in the entire paper. The leaves had to overlap. We talked about positive and negative space and I showed them 35 Logos brilliantly using Negative Space from GraphicDesignBlog.org (found the link on danpink.com) After the space was filled with the overlapping leaves, students were supposed to use two markers to color in the abstract leaf shapes, alternating colors. Most of the students were confused by the alternating and colored in two or three sections at a time instead of one, which threw off the whole pattern. I will probably try a little different version of it next year.
I talked to the first grade students about AB patterns they learned in math class. We thought of opposite adjective pairs to describe pumpkins- tall/short, wide/skinny, normal/jack-o-lantern, etc. I showed the students a couple ways to draw pumpkins and they picked one of the pairs to create an AB pattern.
I was trying to figure out how to fit more artwork into less space for hallway display. I thought it would be awesome to hang the artwork glued to butcher paper to get a nice black background and give it a cleaner look. It was a great idea until I found out that it is just slightly against fire code. My principal explained that it was an innocent mistake so it looks really nice for now but I will have to take it down soon. You live, you learn.