1st Grade Colorful Fish

This is my last beginning of the year fish project!  1st grade students drew a fish- I gave no instruction here except to fill the space by drawing a fish at least as big as their hand- then traced their lines with glue and sprinkled with sand.  I told the students we were adding sand to give our fish more texture.  In the second class, we reviewed color mixing and I gave each student primary and black colored tempera paint.  The students could paint their fish and backgrounds however they wanted.  I did not say that their fish had to be swimming in blue water though that is what most students chose.  After the first day, I started giving the student black paint but said it should only be used to paint over the raised sand surface and help us see the outline and details of the fish.  I've found that giving students black paint to mix colors tends to yield monochromatic paintings- usually all a nice mud color.  (By the way, if you want to see some awesome high school mud paintings, look here!)

Classes who only had one session and students who missed the first day of the project painted then added sand if there was time at the end.  My main goal for the project was to review painting and mixing colors- texture was my secondary goal.

Do your students love mixing colors as much as mine?  Green, pink, and "sky blue" seem to be their favorite colors to mix.  I love to listen to the students talk when they are mixing colors.  Even though they've done it before, it still seems like magic to them when they make a new color whether they are in 1st grade or 6th grade.  I love their excitement when they are allowed to just try new combinations and see what happens.

I think this looks like a Mondrian fish!

Check out the rest of the artwork in our Artsonia exhibit!

Kindergarten Line Fish

Paul Klee's The Golden Fish was the inspiration for this project.  I like starting off the year talking about lines with Kindergarten and since we had a fish theme school-wide, Klee's painting was a very appropriate starting point!

Source: dl.ket.org via Katie on Pinterest

When introducing or reviewing lines, my favorite thing to do is draw a line on the chalkboard then we draw the same line in the air with our fingers.  I haven't read a whole lot about "whole brain" teaching, but I've been told that incorporating actions activates a different part of the brain.  If nothing else, I figure it helps students with different learning styles. (And it's kinda fun.)

This was a two class period project.  I always forget how long it takes just to get names on papers at the beginning of the school year with Kindergarten.  So half of the first class was labeling papers and introducing lines.  We looked at Klee's fish paintings and pointed out all the cool lines we could find before the students drew their own fish.  I asked them to only draw lines and shapes, not to color anything in with their pencils.  I did not show students how they had to draw a fish.  When the "I-can't-ers" and the "I-don't-know-how-ers" acted helpless, I pointed out how Klee used simple shapes to make his fish.  Next, I showed the students how to trace over their pencil lines with crayon trying to press really hard.

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.

My Monday classes once again had to do a shorter version of the project so they just had crayon drawings with no paint.

 

Check out the rest of the artwork in our Artsonia gallery!

3rd Grade Origami Fish

I explained in my last post that my K-3rd grade school started off the year with a fish theme.  I had the idea to make origami fish and put them on a cool painted background.  I taught an origami boat/Monet water lilies lesson last year that went over well so I figured the fish idea would work.  It did work, but in the future, I won't be doing origami for the first project!  I'll let those little minds get used to following directions first, and hope they'll get over the "I can't"s before attempting origami.

I had never made an origami fish before but I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find a pattern that was doable with students.  It was a little harder than I anticipated to find a good pattern.  I tried out several and came up with two that I liked.

Source: origami-resource-center.com via Katie on Pinterest

My schedule was weird again due to Labor Day.  I knew that my Monday classes would have a class and a half instead of two, my Tuesday classes would have two full class periods, and my Friday kids would have two classes as well.  After I made the plan, I found out that my Friday classes would be gone on a field trip so they ended up with only one class, which is why there are 3 different versions of the project in the first photo!

I started my Monday classes on this Pureland Fish (Pattern by Marc Kirschenbaum) at the end of the first class after the expectations and procedures review.  We finished it at the beginning of the second class then after discussing fish habitats, the students were given cool colored tempera paint to create a background and for added interest they drew a line with glue which they sprinkled *sand on.  Students also used sharpies to add details to their fish.

*I may be a little obsessed with sand.  But it's cheap, it makes texture really easy to understand, and it's lots of fun!  The students would put sand on every project if I'd let them.  They get super excited and ask "Is it REAL sand?"

 I used the cooler/more complicated pattern for my Tuesday classes.  It starts with a pinwheel pattern so I had to look up how to make those as well.  It took quite a while to complete this fish- at least a class and a half.  The students were not left with little time paint their backgrounds so no time for sand!  I don't know if I would try this pattern with 3rd graders again, at least not until much later in the year.

 Friday classes had to move really quickly!  We used cardboard tubes and styrofoam cups to print blue and white paint on blue construction paper then made the fish while that dried.  The students had just a couple minutes left to glue down their fish, add details to their fish and background, and glue down sand.

You can check out the rest of the artwork in our Artsonia exhibit!

Klee-Inspired Geometric Shape Fish

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!

Source: awesomeartists.com via Katie on Pinterest

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: