My K-3rd grade school started off the year with a "Fish" theme. The Kindergarten teachers suggested it last spring and we all just kind of went with it! I planned a fish project for each grade. Up first is 2nd grade, just because I finished editing their photos first!
Check out the Artsonia exhibit here, and please don't judge me for the colors being really funky, I am finding that editing with Artsonia's website is time saving since I can do it at school but not the most true to life when Auto correct and Brighten are the only ways to adjust color. But enough about that, read on for my jabbering about the project.
Paul Klee is an artist that I honestly didn't know very much about before starting this project. I knew the name and knew that shapes and abstraction were involved in his work but besides seeing some lesson plans based on him, I never gave him very much thought. I got ahold of some Art for Children books that the library was discarding and one of them was about Paul Klee. I looked through it and mentally filed away a few ideas. For the fish project, I showed the students three of his paintings.
We started by looking at Klee's painting, Castle and Sun, and discussing the shapes which the students were able to identify as geometric. (I always remind them that geometric shapes are the kind they learn about in Math class and that seems to help them remember.) I explained that they would eventually be making pictures of fish so with that in mind, the background was going to be made of squares and rectangles printed in cool colors to remind us of water. I used my handy dandy box cutter to cut squares and rectangles out of cardboard. I didn't worry about using a straight edge or measuring, I wanted a little variety. The students painted tints of purple, blue, and green on the cardboard and then stamped the shape on their paper, black construction paper. I think the added white helped the paint show up better. The little art history lesson, introduction, and printing took the first 40-minute class period.
The best way I found to handle the paint was to put a little tray of each color at each table. I put it on top of this weird vinyl-y stuff that I have packs and packs of. It made a pretty good placemat and contained most of the mess. My tables usually have about 5 students at them so I put two brushes in each paint color. I asked the students to keep the brushes with one color so I didn't have to worry about water. The cardboard pieces just stayed on the vinyl stuff when not in use.
During the second class, we looked at two more Klee paintings: Fish Magic and The Golden Fish. We saw how Paul Klee used geometric shapes to construct his fish. I actually used a
Pinterest board I created about Paul Klee as a way to organize the images I wanted to show the students. It worked really well. I just pulled up the board at the beginning of class and it kept track of the "bookmarks" for me. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art's website was really great because it lets you zoom in to focus on details of the paintings.) Next, we brainstormed some different geometric shapes and I was going to draw them on the chalkboard for reference when I remembered I didn't have to! Instead, I projected a poster that I had saved on, you guessed it, Pinterest, and the students could just look at it for ideas!
Afterwards, each student was given a quarter page black construction paper and asked to draw a fish as big as they could fit on on the page made out of geometric shapes. Of course I had lots of students tell me they didn't know how so I just reminded them that they were imaginary fish and they could keep it simple like an ellipse and a triangle. The "I can't"s and "I don't know how"s seem to be a lot worse at the beginning of the school year...
After they finished drawing in pencil, construction paper crayons were used to fill in the shapes then the fish were cut out and glued down on the printed papers. There ended up being a little extra time in most classes so I let them have the "bonus step" of adding some sand (yes, REAL SAND) to their artwork. They get so darn excited about sand... and I do a little, too! Calling it a "bonus step" seemed to be really motivating.
My schedule can end up being a big mess if I don't change some lessons for classes on certain days. My Tuesday classes hardly ever miss but days off school tend to be scheduled on Mondays and Fridays. Labor day was obviously on a Monday so my Monday classes had 1 1/2 class periods instead of 2. They drew their fish at the end of the first day and colored and printed on the second day. There was no cutting involved. Here is a result from one of those classes:
In the second class, we reviewed lines again and the students used blue crayons to draw lots of different kinds of lines around their fish to represent water and mimic Klee's painting. I also showed them a couple different ways to draw "ocean plants" at the bottom of their papers. To create the resist, students painted their papers with large brushes and watered down tempera paint. I wish I had been brave enough to give them black instead of blue because I love the contrast in Klee's paintings. I was afraid that their lines would totally disappear since most of the Kinders don't quite have the hand strength to press hard enough with crayon and had to really be encouraged to go back over their lines. This is a project that I thought was just turing out awful until I came back after a couple days at my other school and looked again. I think it has potential, but if I do it again, I will probably wait until later in the school year and let the students use whatever paint colors they want with watercolor.
Paul Klee is an artist that I honestly didn't know very much about before starting this project. I knew the name and knew that shapes and abstraction were involved in his work but besides seeing some lesson plans based on him, I never gave him very much thought. I got ahold of some Art for Children books that the library was discarding and one of them was about Paul Klee. I looked through it and mentally filed away a few ideas. For the fish project, I showed the students three of his paintings. 
