This year, I am going with a “Try Your Hardest” Nemo theme. We talked about how Nemo always wanted to try everything and didn’t let his little fin keep him from going to school to learn and doing great things. We talked about how Dori says “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming” and I changed it to “Just keep Drawing, Just keep painting, Just keep Creating” Sometimes they get so scared to make a mistake, that they don’t want to try.
Our School Theme of the Year is “One Team, One Goal, No Limits. The first few weeks of school each grade worked on a drawing to make a large group mural to exemplify the theme. Here are the results. Below, kinder and first grade students made self portraits wearing blue and green (school colors) and holding something that represents them to show how we are all unique, but part of one big team!
For this projects, students learned how to make hexagons and pentagons to create a soccer ball. We talked about how a soccer ball has 20 white hexagons and 12 black pentagons. Students decorated their balls with a variety of lines and colors. One hexagon had to have their name in it disguised with lines. I got this idea from http://kidsartists.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-beautiful-soccer-ball.html
For “No Limits” the students made space shuttles in outer space. We watched a video on www.teachertube.com of the shuttle taking off and the kids were SOOOO EXCITED! I got this idea from http://deepspacesparkle.blogspot.com/ and made my own modifications
We used toothbrushes to splatter paint the stars and little cardboard squares under the planets, shooting stars ,and space men to create dimension. They painted the shuttles with watercolor, and the fire with tempra. Students learned about warm colors (fire) and value when they made their watercolors go from dark to light in each section of the rockets.
I got this name design idea from http://teachkidsart.blogspot.com/
Students folded paper into eight sections, wrote their name in one triangle, and made a graphite transfer of the name onto each section. They then colored with markers and crayons. Students learned about symmetry, radial design, and color schemes.
We have been learning about the artist, Dale Chihuly. The kids have seen videos of him creating his giant glass sculptures and really enjoyed this artist study. These Chihuly “sea forms” were created with watercolors, then details added with oil pastels, and construction paper.
This lesson was soooooo much fun for the kids and I enjoyed seeing their outcomes. I gave them strips of construction paper and we talked about how to fold and glue them into a variety of shapes. An accordian fold makes a star, or a staircase for a slide! After they learned how to make a variety of shapes and forms, they went to their seats to create their sculpture. Some made shape cities, some made shapes on top and inside of larger shapes. Some made roller coasters, ferris wheels, swings, slides, trees, cars, it was an explosion of creativity and for the very first time this year, kinder and first grade were silent. They were working so hard in the “zone” that they were almost totally silent while COMPLETLEY engaged in this lesson!! Here are a few of the results.
some kind of creature
This one was a park, complete with monkey bars, a swing, merry go round, slide, see-saw, and tiny people!
On Fridays I have a class that is not on the regular rotation, so we usually do some sort of painting excercise for a particuler technique or skill. Kinder has just started painting, so we were practicing painting with tempra paint, and cleaning our brushes. It is very important for your brush is clean when you paint with black and white, so we did not want to see any gray pandas. They did a great job! We looked at a variety of different paintings of pandas in different styles of art. We talked about how artists have different styles and how every panda will be different.
students added details with crayons and construction paper.
For the Chihuly baskets (in my last post) students created a sea form shape on Styrofoam and printed with silver and black ink. This was a great skill in learning how to draw 3d forms, and it was their first experience with print making. One of the teachers told me they made her hungry because it looked like the Cabana Bowl from Taco Cabana ~~SIGH~~ I havn’t been able to look at the project the same way since!! 
