Poppy Fields for Remembrance Day

This week, Grade 3 painted these poppy landscapes in honour of Remembrance Day. They were inspired by a lesson I saw on Artsonia here.

Students began with a tempera wash for the sky, then began adding poppies, starting at the bottom of the page going from large size to small size (little red dots). (I reviewed the concept of foreground, middle ground, and background at this point.) Black dots were then painted in the flowers and oil pastel was used for the grass, additional flowers, and clouds.

O'Keefe-Inspired Glue Line Flowers

Magnification is one of the image development strategies that I need to cover in my Grade 6 art curriculum. Georgia O'Keefe's flowers are, of course, great for teaching this concept, but I was getting bored of all of the variations on the close-up flower lesson.

For this lesson, students chose a flower photograph or a silk flower to study and then made a simple close-up drawing of it in their sketchbook. Using Elmer's Gel Glue (my new favourite glue!) they drew their flower on a large piece of watercolour paper. (I demonstrated how to draw a smooth glue line, with the tip of the bottle just slightly brushing the paper.) After the glue was dry (next week's class), students took a Sharpie fineliner and traced around both sides of their glue lines. Then they added colour using semi-moist watercolour paints.

There was way more success with this project than when I did the close-up flowers with acrylic on canvas last year. Both the boys and the girls in my class were happy with their results.

Lots and Lots of Kindergarten Flowers

Kinders were on flower overload these last two weeks. First, they made wildflower paintings and then this week, they did some stamping to make flowers in vases. But hey, I needed to brighten up the art room and make it at least seem like it's springtime. (It's been an overall cool, drippy, and dismal last couple of weeks.)

The wildflower lesson was very successful. I got the idea from this Fine Lines lesson here. I showed some images of wildflowers and we talked about how to create the flower stems by first pressing hard at the bottom of the black paper with construction paper crayons and then ending with a sweeping motion. Students used Q-Tips with liquid tempera to dab the flowers. I've only included a couple of very busy examples, because the sparser ones didn't photograph well on the black paper.

And this week, we worked on flowers in vases, using the lesson that I found on Colour for Everyone. Kinders each received a 6 x 4.5 piece of coloured construction paper. They folded the paper, drew an interesting line going down the side and then cut it out to make a symmetrical vase. After pasting it on some large white paper, they painted two or three large circles on the page using liquid tempera. They then used cut foam sponges (in rectangular and triangular shapes) to stamp the petals around the flowers.

I had red, yellow, and blue paints squeezed out on one tray and students used a brush to paint their sponged different colours before stamping. Next time, I think I'd have very separate paint trays, including the secondary colours and more sponges because the sponge shapes got very muddy with all of the colours being mixed together.

Here are a few:

Colourful Shape Stamping

Shape stamping got very messy and super creative with Grade 1s. I  found a great lesson at laughpaintcreate that focused on letting students explore the different possibilites of mark making on paper (with foam shapes, forks, lids, etc.). 



First, students cut and placed sticky foam shapes onto cardboard squares. (Obviously, this one has already been used as a stamp.)



more stamps...



Then they painted their shapes with liquid tempera, stamped them several times onto the paper, and added more marks with forks and lids.

  

Awesome colour and sense of movement!



More structured and controlled.



Swirling Skies over Cities at Dusk

Right before the winter break, I tried this Deep Space Sparkle lesson with my Grade 1s and they turned out fantastic. Students loved painting the swirling sky backgrounds in the style of Van Gogh and pasting on paper to create houses and buildings.



Kindergarten Lines and Paint Resist

With this lesson, Kinders have now moved on to painting with more than just one colour. This time, they got to use the entire tempera palette and they were sooo excited! I borrowed this line variety lesson idea from Mrs. Brown's Art. It's a great introduction and review of different types of lines.

First, I drew some examples of different types of lines as students called them out (zig-zag, bumpy, curvy, straight etc.). Then, we talked about lines that go "up and down" (vertical) and lines that go side to side (horizontal).  I modeled how I wanted students to draw four different types of lines on their papers, using four different colours of oil pastels; two vertical and two horizontal. Then, I did a quick demonstration/review of how to use the tempera paint and brush and asked that students fill in each area between the lines with different colours. Here are some of the results:

  

A different take on the lesson...but with a brilliant result!