1st Grade Lines and Shapes

If you've been around here very much, you know that this year I switched to TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) which is choice-based art education. There came a time, however, that I felt some of my students needed more explicit instruction and practice on some of the elements of art, mainly lines and shapes, to meet our visual arts standards. I decided to try explicit instruction on lines and shapes, and then let students have studio choices as long as they could show me in the end how they used different kinds of lines and shapes. You can see my full lesson plan on The smARTteacher.

I have mixed feelings about this process, choice within a formal theme, and feel it requires some more experimentation and some good old fashioned action research. I need to make some choices this summer about how I want to complete this research. I'm not at that stage in my graduate courses yet, but it might be something to consider when I do my final research paper.

To prepare for this project, we spent some time exploring a selection of artwork with lines and shapes, both organic and geometric. Identifying and describing the lines and shapes in the artwork helped students see some possibilities. I created Pinterest boards to organize my examples.

http://www.pinterest.com/katiemorris/shape-gallery/ 

http://www.pinterest.com/katiemorris/lines/ 

http://www.pinterest.com/katiemorris/organic-in-art/ - 

I think at this age, a lot of students couldn't see past using lines and shapes in a nonobjective way. Once I told them it was a requirement, lots made ONLY lines and shapes. It kind of reminds me of an article I read the other day on the Art of Education where Ian Sands talks about not grading art anymore. Great article, check it out!

While I feel that this assignment limited the thinking of some of my students, I guess this was a loosey goosey way of standardizing things. I think that will have to happen more and more as we will need to start developing and using common assessments in my district next year. I'm just trying to be positive about it and find a way to still allow choice and jump through the necessary hoops.

Check out some of the other student work. I think the majority did a really good job of showing the use of lines and shapes while still communicating THEIR idea.

Chalk Paint Graffiti

Here's a little preview of what my 6th graders will be trying out during their last art class this week: chalk paint graffiti inspired by Banksy! I will hopefully be posting student examples later this week. A couple of years ago the students tried out spraying water through stencils inspired by Reverse Graffiti. It was fun but only lasted a few minutes before the water evaporated. I saw a recipe for sidewalk paint on Pinterest and decided to give it a try! I'm getting pretty laid back in my recipe following these days. I ended up just dumping some corn starch in spray bottles and adding food coloring and water until it looked right to me! Some over eager 4th graders were helping clean palettes last week and dumped out what I had mixed to clean... soooo I had to start over. Thankfully I had only mixed 2 colors so far!

Anyway, I reused some old posters that were heading for the trash bin as the material to create my stencils and tested out the chalk paint. It works! I think the students will be very excited, especially the ones that have been asking to learn about graffiti. Don't worry, we'll be talking about issues with legality and morality.

If you try out the sidewalk paint, just remember that it will get more opaque as it dries.

You can find this lesson on the SmartTeacher.

If you need ideas for end of the school year projects, check out these lessons: http://www.katiemorrisart.com/2012/07/6-more-ideas-for-end-of-school-year-art.html

Kinder Circles

One of the first projects for my Kindergarten students this year was stamping and painting dots for International Dot Day. We talked about shapes when the students used empty play-doh containers to stamp circles into a composition. Some overlapped, some didn't. Some dragged the containers all over the paper which made it mostly turn black. I didn't encourage this but didn't make them stop. I might have said something like "Oh, you won't have much room to add color next week if you turn your paper all black!" but I was fine with them exploring the tool.

 In the second class, we talked about the primary colors and how they can be mixed to create secondary colors. Each table was give only primary colors and the students were encouraged to try creating new colors. My new painting management technique is to put out a sponge instead of giving out paper towels. Students clean their brushes in the shared water and then blot on the shared sponge. I think this idea came from Choice Without Chaos if I remember correctly! It has worked very well so far, though I still have students asking "What is the sponge for again?" The sponge is a lot more absorbent than the brown paper towels at school.

I used the opportunity to talk about paintbrush care since it was the first exposure to tempera paint for most students. They did a pretty good job for the first time! I asked them to "dip the tip", hold the paintbrush "like a pencil", and mix paint on the paper instead of mixing all the colors together on the tray. I love how the paintings turned out. Some painted inside each circle and some did not. Either way, I think they are beautiful! Some students even added crayon in the next class period. I am WAAAAY behind on this blogging thing! Oh, parenthood. The boys are worth it! :)

2nd grade Painting with Scissors

 I like to use Matisse to teach 2nd graders about shape. The last 2 years we've spent time learning about Matisse and his artwork, then the students used construction paper to create their compositions. Some of the students did a nice job but most struggled with the idea of overlapping while maintaing some sort of balance. (Gluing so many layers that you can no longer see the cut shapes was common.) To try to remedy that we painted the background with paint and created the foreground by painting with scissors.

Source: youtube.com via Katie on Pinterest

The first class period was spent on introduction- we watched the video of Matisse painting with scissors, above, then a PPT presentation of his artwork- and creating the background. The students used rulers (if they wanted) to divide their 9x12 inch paper into geometric shapes. The students were given tempera paint in the primary colors to fill in their spaces. In the second class period, the students used construction paper scraps to make organic shapes. When we discussed Matisse's artwork, the students liked to point out "ish" shapes since we had recently read the book by Peter H. Reynolds. I asked that one of their organic shapes be an "ish" shape and some could just be free form. The students this year actually did a pretty good job controlling their glue but some still can not understand (or choose to ignore) the "just a dot, not a lot" reminder. :)

This student missed the first day so I asked her to start by selecting some large geometric shapes to glue down before moving on to organic shapes.

Sports Spheres

 I've been trying to teach my students the difference between shapes and forms. I knew I wanted to do a lesson with 5th grade focused on the illusion of form through creating value and when I found out that our Family Fun Night (an event that bring several hundred students and their families to the building) theme would be "Sportacular", I decided to use the spheres found in sports as inspiration. Really, it makes sense. Balls are something tangible that the students are very familiar with, and sports are very motivating. (*By the way, try not to say the word "balls" if you can avoid it. It often leads to wild giggles.) I did tell the students if they didn't want to paint a ball, they could think of another spherical object to paint.

I borrowed a variety of balls from our PE teacher so the students would have a real object to look at. To introduce the assignment, I grabbed the real basketball, a painting I made of a basketball, and I made a quick line contour drawing of a basketball on the whiteboard. The students discussed how they were alike and different then I showed how 3D objects, objects with FORM, have highlights and shadows, and that adding highlights and shadows (VALUE) to paintings can create the illusion of form. I finally remembered to bring a flashlight to school which helped illustrate the concept of highlights. Regular fluorescent lighting is not directional so it can be hard for students to see. 

I demonstrated painting a sphere. I recommended that the students paint a base color first, followed by adding the highlight, then add the shadow last and blend, blend, blend. The students used a compass to draw a circle on a 9x12 inch piece of paper then chose their paint colors. The balls did not have to be painted in traditional colors. For white spheres, I suggested choosing a color instead of black for the shadow. After the base of the sphere was painted, the students added the identifying lines. 

In the second class period, the students added the remaining details then cut out their balls. Because I knew I would be asked a hundred times how to draw the lines and I didn't have enough balls for everyone, I made up some reference pages that showed the steps for drawing a basketball, baseball/softball, volleyball, and how a tennis ball would look from different views. Only a few students attempted soccer balls and I showed them the "how to draw a soccer ball" page here because I honestly wasn't sure how the pentagons and hexagons fit together before. If I teach this same lesson again, I will not recommend golfballs. A couple students attempted, but there were too darn many dimples and it just didn't work out well. Most students drew in pencil first then used a thin brush to paint the lines and a few used sharpies. I hoped that all would have time to use the thin paintbrush because I thought it would be good to practice brush control.

Some of the artwork went on my bulletin board and the rest of the balls were taped along the hallway walls to look like they were bouncing. After this project I found out that some of my 5th graders need more practice with their cutting skills! Or maybe it was an issue of patience. Either way, some students did a really nice job painting then cut it out so sloppily that it didn't even look like a circle anymore.

 I definitely wanted to use the bulletin board to drive home the main points with students and show everyone that we didn't just make decorations.

 My favorite part is below. I labeled 2D examples with "this is a shape"and "this is the illusion of form" then painted a styrofoam ball the same color to hang from the ceiling with a label that says "this is an actual form".

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. :)