3rd Grade Fall Project- Warm Weaving/Cool Leaf Printing

It took me so long to get all my fall lessons photographed last year that I just decide to save them up to post closer to the correct season. It's still technically summer while I'm typing this, but

1. I start back to school in 2 days.
2. The drought is making the leaves turn brown and fall to the ground so it looks a little bit like fall today.
3. I'm already thinking about lessons for the fall semester and you might be, too!

Back in my very first year of teaching (3 whole years ago seems like a long time now) I had planned a very similar lesson for 2nd grade but it took so long to weave, and I had a disastrous experience trying to print leaves with another grade, that it just stayed a weaving. I decided to be brave and try it with 3rd grade last year. We reviewed warm and cool colors (I tend to incorporate a lot of color theory) and the students identified warm colors as "fall colors". I explained that the students would be weaving using warm colored construction paper then printing leaves on top using cool colors. All except for a couple new students had learned to weave in Art class the year before so they didn't need much review aside from how to hold the folded paper to cut the warp and I had my early finishers help students who were struggling. I'm pretty sure we did this in one class period since I let the students choose from 6x9 inch construction paper instead of a full 9x12 inch sheet. After the strips were woven as tightly as we could get them, students with extra time added glue to the loose ends for extra security.

After the weaving was complete, I passed out trays to each table with green, blue, and purple tempera paint and 2 brushes for each color. We didn't want to make a mess on the tables, so I passed out some odd sized paper scraps for the students to brush on top of. It didn't take long for us to realize that the negative space of the leaf had possibility so we reviewed positive and negative space and turned this into a 2 part project! The students tried to make a nice composition with their overlapping negative space leaves as well as printing on their weavings.

State "Space" Symbol Drawings

 There were lots of "S" words involved in this 2nd grade lesson. The Shape of our State was used as the base. The students learned about Space (not outer) and chose to draw at least 5 Kansas Symbols in either the positive or negative space.

In the 1st class period, we read part of One Kansas Farmer, focusing on the symbols for our state like the Sunflower, Cottonwood Tree, Ornate Box Turtle, Meadowlark, Buffalo, Tiger Salamander, and the Honey Bee. We talked about how other things not in the book could be symbols like our capital building and wheat. 

We hadn't talked much about "Space" before so I introduced positive and negative space. I like to stand like a statue with my hand on my head so I can point out that the statue (my body) is positive space and the space around me, as well as the "hole" between my arm and my body are negative space. I showed a piece of paper with the shape of the state of Kansas printed on it and the students identified the shape as positive space and the empty border as negative.

I told the students they would be choosing positive or negative to work in and showed examples of filling the chosen space with symbols. I had lots of pictures printed off for the students to reference at each table. They all "got" the positive/negative space idea, the only challenge was getting them to fill the space. We all know it's tricky to get students to draw big- some would draw their 5 symbols then tell me they were done even though they needed to add more to fill in the gaps.

In the 2nd class, the students used Color Sticks and colored pencils to fill in their drawings. I think that I added a 3rd class period for some classes when the schedule allowed it. When the students finished coloring, they cut out their drawings and glued to a bigger piece of paper. The drawings were started on copy paper so I could reproduce the shape of the state so this step added some stability. I did not tell the students their states needed to face the proper direction, mostly because I didn't think about it in time. Some put their states the "right" way, some just turned the shapes however they wanted.

 Students who finished early wrote artist statements about their work before moving on to free draw. One of the 2nd graders told her teacher this was "The BEST Art project ever!" Kids are so easy to please. :)