4th Grade Clay Leaves

I walk my dog down the block every morning before work. When I saw my favorite tree four houses down from mine start to drop a lot of it's leaves after a very windy night, I knew that this was the day to drop everything and make clay leaves with my 4th graders!

This year I opted for a painting lesson with the leaves instead of glaze.

2nd Grade Stars and Stripes

2nd Grade classes finished Stars and Stripes just in time for Veteran's Day!

I found this lesson on Mrs. Picasso's Art Room Art Blog. http://mrspicassosartroom.blogspot.com/ Thank you for sharing this! It was posted in her Flickr Photostream area. Bells and whistles went off when I saw it! Tissue paper collage, printing, "how to draw a star" and Jasper John's... lots of wonderful concepts to explore! Fortunately it took a couple of classes to complete so I broke down the concepts into manageable pieces.

After completing their artwork, students got busy creating Thank You cards for veterans. It was great using the scraps left from the Stars and Stripes. Lots of variations happened on the cards, including students cutting out a lot of small stars and adding them to their design. The second grade classroom teachers worked with their classes writing the note that went inside the Thank You cards. One classroom teacher had her students write short descriptive paragraph about Veteran's Day and posted them on the bulletin board with all of the Stars and Stripes.
After school on Friday I dropped off the cards at nursing homes in Green Bay and DePere, WI. I sent an email out to the staff inviting them to take a Thank You card to share with any veterans that they knew. Several teachers came down for a card, and one offered to take the remaining cards to a friend who will get them to active servicemen from our area. Sweet!
The heart design on the cards came from Mrs. Picasso's Flickr Photostream too.

Drawing a star is a challenge for second grade, but they were excited to try it! Everyone flipped their dry tissue collage paper over and practiced two small stars on the back of the paper before tackling a big one in the middle of their paper. After this I brought out tracer stars and students had the choice of using their own drawn star or using the tracer.

Day of the Dead Skeletons

My 5th graders dove into this lesson - they LOVED it!
Most of these do not have a paper backing. They just look like they do because I had to lay them on a table to photograph. They were fun to hang on the wall all tippy - they look like they're dancing.
Thank you Barbara from "Barbara's Thought of the Day" Blog for this great lesson idea!
Magical Skeletons - http://barbarasthoughtoftheday.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html#8576380871176990723

Adaptive Art Clay Pumpkin

In Adaptive Art we rolled out a slab of clay, cut out a pumpkin shape and drew in pumpkin sections with a pencil. They were approximately 8" high and 7" wide, give or take a little here and there. After firing the clay we mixed reds and yellow tempera paint to create orange, and painted. We ran a colored Twisteez Wire through a hole in the pumpkin stem and beaded. The beading was the favorite activity with this lesson. I am not posting the photograph of the final piece with the mod podge painted on because the glare didn't photograph well. Today was the day we gently wrapped them in newspaper and sent them home.
If I were to do this again I would have students sprinkle tiny seed beads onto the wet mod podge and do a second coat when dry. I think the texture would look interesting and feel interesting to my students.
For info on Twisteez Wire: http://twisteezwire.com/ (This is GREAT colored wire, I use it in many lessons. Check it out!)

Hanging Art Tip

I love my rubber mallet! I don't need it often, but it sure does the trick when I want to hang artwork on the cinderblock walls at school.
WI winter temperatures dip way below zero, in fact students have indoor recess or come into the school building in the morning only when the temperature goes below -5 degrees. So if I want to hang artwork on an outside wall it's normal for the work to start falling off within a day because of the moisture that builds up on the inside warmer wall. The mallet is the trick that keeps the artwork up for weeks.
About 10 years ago I learned this trick. I was involved in a big artist-in-residence program at my school and we were using a lot of old, curled up paper hanging from masking tape on cinder block walls. If you whack the tape with the rubber mallet a couple of times the paper stayed put on the wall. We could take the paper down and rehang it with the same masking tape several times if we whacked it with a mallet every time we hung it. Since that time I have kept a rubber mallet in the desk drawers of both of my schools for the rather infrequent times I need it.

You need to remember to move your head to the side when you whack the mallet, there is a spring back action to it and you don't want your nose in line with it -ouch!

Adaptive Art Scarecrows

I needed a short lesson for my Adaptive Art class a couple of weeks ago. We needed just a couple of minutes to complete a lesson we had invested 3 class periods in, and I didn't want to start a new, big project until the next time we met. This scarecrow lesson took 20-25 minutes to complete. I kept it simple; the shape of the scarecrow head was precut. We concentrated on identifying eyes, ears, noses and cheeks as we practiced cutting and gluing. The burlap hat was a quick fold with student help, and then I hot glued them so the folds stayed put.

I had just brought in some shape punches that morning. My students loved putting the effort into getting the paper to punch out a flower shape, although not everyone wanted to use the flowers once they had them. We'll definitely do that again, it was a good exercise in using all the muscles in their hands and arms to get the punch to work.

Third Grade Self Portraits