3rd grade- How we Express Ourselves

3rd graders examined the tree drawings and paintings of Piet Mondrian.  They learned the difference between realistic and abstract.  We examined trees and created our own abstract and realistic trees.  

1st grade painting

I cannot get over how beautiful these paintings are.  1st graders examined the overlapping shape paintings of Robert Delaunay.  They sketched their own overlapping shapes and painted them, and then used black lines to create unity.  

Kindergarten: Where we are in place and time

Kinders just began a unit about art around the world.  Each week, we explore art from a particular country.  This week, it was Japan.  Here, we examined Koi fish in Japanese art.  We used simple shapes like ovals and triangles to draw our own fish and colored them with colored pencils.

Rainbow collages

During a short unit about color, my kinders looked through National Geographic magazines to find the colors of the rainbow.  This was a tricky activity for some, because it takes a keen eye to recognize certain colors.  Here are some products that met my objectives.

Kindergarten Playgrounds

I try to choose process driven activities for kindergarten that afford lots of choice and problem solving.  This is when are kiddos are so creative and we cannot hinder that by forcing them to create pre-fabricated projects.  Here, they manipulated paper to make their own playgrounds.  

Normally, I wouldn't use print-out people for them to color, but it was a last minute request from a few  students, so i thought, why not? The objective of the lesson was to manipulate paper to make it stand up, not draw people.  That's for another day!

3rd grade Abstract Food Paintings

3rd graders are exploring realism vs abstraction.  For this assignment, they were asked to come up with six foods and portray them in an abstract way, thinking about the foods as textures, patterns, and colors.  This was my first time doing this lesson (I was first exposed to the lesson in a college painting class!) and it went great!  The kids loved it.  They especially loved sharing their paintings with their friends as they guessed each others foods.