Grade 2 Clay Owl Pictures

As follow-up to one of my fall lessons here, I wanted to share just a few pictures that I took of students' clay owls. The project was a huge hit, and the kids were very keen to wrap their owls up in little organza bags and give them as holiday gifts.

The owls on display in the glass hallway cabinet. (I put in some pinecones and branches so they would feel at home.)

Clay Owls...in process

I have seventy Grade 2 students, so clay projects are a production (especially if I have to do two firings, one for bisque and one for glaze). This clay owl project from Teaching Art with Attitude that I found on Pinterest is great because they only need the one firing and they get finished with oil pastel and black paint/ink. Easy!

Students were each given a slab of low-fire terracotta clay, were shown an owl shape on the board, lightly drew their shape on the clay and cut it out using a wooden skewer. Then they smoothed the rough edges with some water.

Eyes were punched out with plastic lids, stamped in the middle with the top of a marker, and lines were drawn around the eyes. The beak was then drawn and cut out. Students then scored and slipped the eyes and beak and attached them to their owls. Wings were drawn, and texture was added with clay tools and the tops of markers.

Later in the day, I went around and poked one or two holes on each owl's head for hanging purposes. Then I placed wet paper towel over each one to minimize cracking in the drying process.

The owls have just been fired now and the kids are super excited to work on them in class next week.

I wanted to test out the finishing process, so here is my owl. I coloured on it with oil pastels and gave it a bath in watered-down India ink. Then I dried it off and attached some copper wire to hang it.

The original lesson said to bathe the owl in watered-down tempera but I decided to try India ink and loved the super black effect.

I heart Instagram.

Students' owls to be posted next week!

Landscape with Cypresses

Another Van Gogh lesson doesn't seem incredibly original, but this project from Deep Space Sparkle explores the fun technique of chalk pastel dipped into tempera paint. This was also my Grade 2 students' favourite project this year and last, so it is definitely staying in the repertoire.

It requires some organization, quite a bit of paper cutting, and then a lot of clean-up....but when the results are as stunning as they are, it totally makes it worth it. And if you have the energy, this is best done at the end of the year when all of your pastels are broken anyways.

It's a great lesson to reinforce the concepts of foreground, middle-ground, and background, as well the design principle of movement. I like to talk about how Van Gogh's paintings have a thick impasto, and tell students that it is even rumoured that deep within the layers of his paint, some of it might still be wet. I like to emphasize that like Van Gogh, students should aim to create lots of texture in their paintings, not worrying about leaving blobs and clumps of the paint on the paper. They love this.

In her lesson, Patti suggests using white or coloured tempera paint. We just used white, which I put into shallow plastic cups, and then dipped in the coloured chalk pastel.

This project took us about three 45 minute blocks.

Simply a Still Life with Bread

Sometimes simple is what's needed after a messy, multi-step, multi-class project. As Grade 2s finished their Van Gogh landscapes project (which I will post soon), I had them sit sketch a still life that I had set up on the carpet area. This was the first time doing still life with this grade, so it was a little bit of an experiment. I gave students just a tiny bit of instruction on sketching techniques but what I really wanted was to see was what they came up on their own and how each one of them would render the objects onto paper differently. There turned out to be such a variety of scale, persepctive, drawing style and composition amongst them. It was very interesting to see what they included/excluded and emphasized in their drawings. (P.S. There were two classes and two different set-ups so the drawings are a little different for that reason as well.)

But what may have been the best part was breaking bread. At the end of both classes, when they were all sitting to leave, I took the huge loaf of French bread and starting tearing it up in front of them. You can't imagine the looks on their faces when they realized that they would each be getting a piece. They were so excited! Who knew that such a simple lesson and the simple pleasure of eating fresh bread would be such a hit. :)

I LOVE this one! Just look at those lines!

 

Colour Wheel Umbrellas





Fall can be a very rainy time in Vancouver, and about a month ago, I started seeing these huge, vibrantly coloured umbrellas being toted all around town. Passing by the Vancouver Art Gallery one day a couple of weeks ago, I saw them displayed in the gallery shop window. These umbrellas inspired this colour mixing lesson with my Grade 2s, who had just finished their colour wheel pizzas.

To begin, I did a directed drawing of an umbrella with my students. I showed them how to draw the little "hill" for the top of the umbrella, cut it down the middle, and then add 2 symmetrical sloping lines down on either side. Then I had students "jump" between the umbrella posts to create the characteristic umbrella edges. Students were then instructed to draw a j-shaped handle, and fill up the space around the umbrella with large raindrops.

After outlining their pencil drawings with Sharpie, I showed how to mix the primary colours to make secondary colours. Even though most students had some experience with mixing colours, that didn't stop all of the "oohs and ahhhs" when blue and red turned into purple. Students got to work painting their colours, and when they were done, they mixed white and black to create a grey and stormy looking background on another piece of paper. This first part took about 2 full blocks of class (1 hour and 40 minutes).

The next class (when everything was all dry), I had students cut out cloud shapes from grey construction paper and glue them onto their grey painted background. Then they cut out their umbrellas and raindrops and glued those onto the background as well.

Cutting and pasting up a storm!



Voila-beautiful!



Colour Wheel Pizzas!



a close-up of a pizza on the "oven rack"

Grade 2s have been learning colour theory and I found this excellent lesson to teach it on Art Lessons for Kids. First, we discussed the primary and secondary colours and how they relate to each other on the colour wheel. Then, students traced a large foam plate on paper for their circle, cut a line through the middle with a ruler, and drew and X to make 6 pie pieces. The pie pieces were coloured in with crayons (I made sure to have students test the colours beforehand to look for "true" colours.) After colouring and cutting out their pizza, off they went to the toppings stations. I had pipe cleaners, plastic beads, feathers, foam shapes, scrap paper, glitter glue, pompoms, and curling ribbon stations. Students proceeded to decorate their pizzas with all of these crazy toppings, using white glue.

When they were finished, they placed their pizzas on the "oven rack" to bake. The students absolutely loved this lesson and I even got a "thank-you for a fun art class" card from a student at the end of it. :)


Ooops! Too much glue!