Martin Luther King Jr. Rainbow

I thought of this lesson for our kindergarteners since we will be doing color mixing soon. I did it with my girls today on Martin Luther King’s birthday…what a perfect day to learn about “COLOR”

First we read the book, Martin by his sister Christine King Ferris

I asked my three year old…

“ What would Martin Luther King tell your class if he came to visit??”

“He would tell them no fighting, and no NO being mean because that makes us cry!!”

“He would tell us to share, and to love our sisters,

like how I love mine,

and to share.”

She also told me that Martin’s favorite color was pink, and that he probably loved to make art with his friends!!

I have a dream that one day… one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Today we mixed colors by holding hands…

We started by making red and yellow hand prints, then they held hands…

and mixed it up…….WOW ORANGE!!

Then blue and yellow…

They couldn’t believe when they made GREEN!!

Then red (I added a bit of pink) and blue….

PURPLE!!!!!

It was SO AMAZING they just kept staring at their hands!!

Happy Birthday Martin Luther King Jr.!!

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Guess what! This blog was recently nominated by some of its followers for The Art of Education’s Award for Top Art Blogs of the Year! If you enjoy the blog, you can go to this LINK TO VOTE for Smart Class!! Make sure you check out the other links to other FABULOUS art blogs!!!

Hearts, Eyes, Mermaids, and MLK!!

We have been having lots of fun with HEARTS! This week we have been making warm/cool color heart paper weavings! I gave them bright colored paper and they had to color one cool color heart and one warm color heart. Then they cut them and wove them together.

Kinder and first have been studying how to add emotions to our artwork. They draw a lot of people in social studies and will be making self portraits later this year, so I thought this would be a great prep exercise! We did a group collage of different emotions.

I tell them the letter “V” above the eyes makes them look mad. We scrunched our eyebrows and felt them on our faces. Then we felt our cheeks go up and down when we smiled and stopped. We drew Humpty Dumpty on tag board, and then they cut him into pieces like a puzzle. They traded puzzles with friends when they finished.

One of my fifth graders made this card for our counselor.There is a tiny frame on the desk that says #1 Counsellor, a coffe mug with coffee in it, a computer, mouse, printer, and even framed ART on the wall! She used the fold that we did for the Spooky houses, (here is the step by step )http://elementaryartfun.blogspot.com/2009/11/spooky-houses.html

Okay, I am a freak about eyes. I have just started this exercise with second grade, but am going to do it with 3rd-5th too. We looked at lots of pictures of eyes first.

We talk about how they are 3d and the form is called a sphere

They learned the parts of the eye, pupil, iris, eye lid (like windshield wipers to keep them clean), eye lashes, and reflection of light. We talk about the light source, and how the reflection should be a rectangle if its a window.

I took a picture of a student and we looked at his eyes up close. I showed them how you can change the color in Photoshop.

Then they used oil pastels to draw eyes!

Kinder-2nd made these mermaid drawings with sparkly paper tails!

I wish I could have photographed more of them, they were so cute!

When we came back from MLK Holiday we talked a lot about Civil Rights, Equality, and watched a video of MLK Jr. giving his I have a dream speech.

We made these crayon resist paintings and students wrote words around them like freedom, equality, peace, love, tolerance..