Dandelion Fun

I learned that these are called "wishing lions" today. When you blow on them you make a wish!
We had a fun day today creating our wishing lions and talking about even and odd numbers of flowers to include in the project. It was nice to get back to making a bit of mess :) after working on a very special Mother's day project the past few weeks.
Hope everyone is enjoying the longer days and wonderful season change! Summer is just around the corner!

Spring Flowers!

This week students used all kinds of art supplies to create a vase of flowers! After lots of discussion about shapes and sizes of vases and flowers, students started with an oil pastel to create a vase. Next, they placed big dots of green paint at the bottom of the vase and used a straw to blow the paint up toward the top! After they had as many stems and they wanted, they used paper scraps to create the flower blooms!
Fun project! A lot of steps for the first week back from Spring break but everyone was on board for the challenge!

Hydrangea Blooms!

This week we discussed pointillism and looked at some work of Seurat's. We took a close up look at the dots in his paintings and discussed complimentary colors. Using the color wheel, students could see that complimentary colors are directly across from each other. Before students started painting with their finger instead of a brush, we looked at images of hydrangea blooms for inspiration! Next, student's chose two colors that complimented each other and painted dots with their fingers creating hydrangea blooms!

Dots and Dots of Butterflies

This week we continued to paint using dots and discussing pointillism....


Amazing work from the upper level last week!


Beginning the outline of a butterfly


Finishing the background of the painting

Musical Instrument Inventors and More Masks!

This week the lower level classes had an opportunity to look at and discuss symmetry and African masks. They used this for inspiration in their own mask making. They used scissors, glue, markers, scraps, yarn, straws and just about anything else we could find! They are all incredible and totally different!

The upper level class this week had a musical instrument inventors workshop. Using cardboard tubes of all sizes, beans, lots of heavy duty tape, glue and many many other scraps, supplies and things that would otherwise be tossed or recycled, students created a musical wonderland in the classroom. The class time flew by so quickly I didn't get a chance to snap any pictures of artists at work or the finished product! Trust me, these instruments and creativity were amazing!

Fun Primary Colors youtube.com

Here is a link to a fun sesame street video about primary colors!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu44JRTIxSQ

The Final Masks and a Creative Challenge!

This week I read the book "Beautiful Oops" to the lower level classes. It's a fantastic book about turning your "oops's" into beautiful artwork!
Students started by drawing a quick squiggle on a page. Next came the challenge.... They passed their page to the person next to them. The challenge was to make something out of the squiggle.
Below you can see this squiggle turned out to be a porcupine!



This one turned out to be a fox!


The upper level worked on finishing their masks today using all sorts of supplies!