Royal Self-Portraits with 1st Grade

This is the 2nd time I've done this project with my Firsts and it is just getting better. Check out the first time I did this project here.

Each day I like to start with a book but wanted to stay away from classic Princess stories and read ones that had a little more empowering messages or were outside the box. The first day of we started with the book The Paper Bag Princess. Then with an awesome activity to kick off this lesson--I put a variety of pictures of royal people real and cartoon on the smartboard and paired off kiddos with dry erase boards. They had to work together to draw or write the details they saw that made the people look royal. I did this same activity last year and it really gets the idea generation going for them when they start to draw. After this activity, they watched my demo of drawing my royal portrait and got busy drawing and outlining in black sharpie.

The second day we started with the book Princess Justina Albertina. A few had to finish outlining in sharpie and then they spent the rest of the time coloring in crayon.

The next day we started with the book Princess Smartypants and talked about creating different backgrounds that would work well with the rest of our artworks like colors connected to their clothing or dragons if they made a knight. They used tempera cakes to paint their backgrounds.

On the last day we wrapped up the project by doing their first critique. Whenever First through Fourth graders finish a project I have them do a gallery walk, hamburger critique, and fill out a rubric. I read them the book Mousterpiece as an introduction to talking about museums and art galleries and how we act when visiting them.

For our gallery walk we lay the artwork on the tables and walk around looking at everyone's work. I put up this slide and pop in one of their artworks for a little excitement.

Then I pick three kiddos to share their work. They can say anything they want to about it before we do the "Hamburger". Whoever is sharing their work gets to pick three different friends to say the three statements "I Like (something they like about their art), "Maybe you could have (something they would have done different), and another "I like (something they like about their art).

Rubrics for 1st are pretty basic and we do them together the first few times. When they finished rubrics, if they wanted to do glitter, I showed that small group how to draw with glue where they wanted glitter to be.

I am so in love with these! Until next time!

"I Ain't Gonna Paint No More" Self-Portraits (2017)

These self-portraits are inspired by one of my favorite books "I Ain't Gonna Paint No More!" written by Karen Beaumont, Illustrated by David Catrow, an Art Teacher book must have!

There are a lot of different versions of projects based on this book out there, I love doing it this way because they really get to play with the watercolors, and it is a great intake of drawing, painting, cutting, and writing skills.

I've done this project many times in the past and it's made transformations over the years. Here are older posts if you are looking to see what I've done in the past and the project broken down a little more. Here is November 2016, October 2015, June 2015, and my first attempt in June 2014.

The only change this year was a little cutting practice before we cut out the portraits, mostly formative assessment to see what I was working with and so I could make scissor-hold corrections right away. I drew up this sheet and we sat on the floor together and cut each part while I told a story about "my friend Joe who wanted to get to the kitchen to eat all the triangle foods he was thinking about" but first he had to "weave through the forest", "climb the very sharp hills", "climb across the thick wall", and "swim across the pond". We finished with a bubble cut around him and his thoughts so he "wouldn't forget what he wanted to eat when he got to the kitchen". It was so successful one of my Kindergarten teachers asked me to draw up some other cutting sheets for her kiddos. 

Right: "Can I draw what's on our insides?"

Royal Self-Portraits with 1st Grade

 I usually do the same projects for K&1 but for the start of the year I like to do the Ain't Gonna Paint project with my kinders. So, while kindergarten was painting all over themselves, first grade became royal!

I can use details in my self-portrait that make me look royal.
I can paint an organized background.

Day 1: Look and Draw
Read a really fun book called "The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark" and did a really fun activity to kick off this lesson--I put a variety of pictures of royal people real and cartoon on the smartboard and paired off kiddos with dry erase boards. They had to work together to draw or write the details they saw that made the people look royal. Then together, we combined our ideas into a big list. After this activity, they watched my demo of drawing my royal portrait and got busy drawing. I had a big stack of books from the library for visual reference for them to use as well.

Day 2: Outline and Color
The next day they spent outlining and coloring but we started with a story out of the book
"A Princess, A Pirate, And One Wild Brother". It has three stories in it, we just read the princess one. When it was work time, there was a little roadblock --I asked them to outline in the color they were going to be coloring things in with--not many were able to do that, or forgot, or just didn't focus enough to accomplish that. Thinking about it now, it wasn't that important to color match, so we will probably just go all black sharpie the next time I do this lesson, especially with painting later on (if they were not super controlled with their paint their water soluble marker lines blurred or smeared).We colored with crayons and I really pushed kids to improve coloring skills.

Day 3: Painting sparkles and metal
We started with a rather interesting TumbleBook--"Princess Justina Albertina"--it's worth the read/watch. After their coloring was finished I put out metallic and sparkle paint in all different colors for them to add details with to their self-portrait. Sparkles and shiny paint are REALLY exciting to first graders so we had a bit of chat about what would actually sparkle or shine in real life. Also chatted about being in control of our choices and really thinking about what we were doing before we did it. Impulse control baby! I only had a few kiddos go really REALLY overboard with the sparkles but there was also behavior issues involved there.

Day 4: Background painting.
Started with another digital story about a King--"The Kiss That Missed" done by Storyline Online.

Then it was time to paint, tempera cakes are one of my favorite materials for background painting. They don't wrecked/ruined easily and they produce really beautiful colors--so just about everything looks good! We talked about making choices in the background that make our background look on purpose and organized.

Another plus of tempera cakes is they dry fast so when they were done painting, I did the unthinkable--GLITTER. They used a glue bottle to draw where they wanted glitter then brought it over to me at the glitter station where we sprinkled glitter and put it on the drying rack.

This might have to be a repeat in the future with just a few changes. Also, there are some great Tumble Books available and books from Storyline Online that you could use for lessons and give your voice a break. Check out all the ones they have!

"Ain't Gonna Paint No More" Self-Portraits (2016)

I've done this project quite a few times now and it's still my favorite way to start the year with Kindergarten. Check out lots of posts on this project via this post.

The portraits are inspired by one of my favorite books "I Ain't Gonna Paint No More!" written by Karen Beaumont, Illustrated by David Catrow, an Art Teacher book must have!

There are a lot of different versions of projects based on this book out there, I love doing it this way because they really get to play with the watercolors, and it is a great intake of drawing and writing skills.

Back to School Collaborative Self-Portraits!

Sorry I've been missing since mid-August but it's been a very busy start of the year and I have a lot of exciting things to start sharing again!

This project has been floating all over the internet and I was finally inspired to do it myself after this post and this post from Cassie Stephens! Love LOVE LOOOOOVVVVEEE the way it turned out!

This was the perfect way to kick off the year and get almost all 400ish students busy making art on the first day. 

I Can draw a self-portrait and color it using one color to make a collaborative artwork.

Day 1:

1st grade through 4th grade started their first day of art with the art room scavenger hunt you see below... I got the idea from an instagram post but I just can't seem to find it again to give the credit this idea deserves! I had students work in teams and I helped read when needed. They went to the location in the room that matched the circle and found a color there. They filled in the circle on their sheet with the color they found. It was a great refresher for everyone and perfect for new students. 

After they finished the scavenger hunt I talked about the art piece they were going to create collaboratively showing them an example of another completed one so they understood why they were just using one color. I showed them my demo video of me drawing and then they got busy. I gave them white 4x4 squares, cartooning sheets to look at for inspiration, and a black felt tip pen to draw with.

Kindergarten spent Day 1 hearing the book Art Today! (HIGHLY recommend for the first day for Kinders), going on a tour of the art room, and drawing me anything they wanted so I could get a skills intake.

The book is a bit hard to find but Crystal Productions does sell it. 

Day 2:
Each table got a box of art supplies in their color only. This was SO worth taking the time to do. In the box there was colored pencils, regular crayons as well as glitter, metallic, and construction paper crayons, skinny markers, fat markers, fluorescent markers, and sharpies. They could use any material anywhere with the exception of marker on their face so it wouldn't cover their features. They also had to color the entire square.

 It didn't take the entire time for them to finish but I anticipated that so they could have time to explore new items in the art room.

After seeing Cassie's final product, if I do this again I will think of a different way to assemble or go BIGGER for a bigger impact on the walls. It was so fun watching students search for theirs!

Cassie's finished Product

2nd Grade Underwater Self-Portraits (2015)

Second graders loved Robert Wyland so much that we did two projects inspired by him. Out first was Warm and Cool Waves, the second were these AWESOME underwater self-portraits inspired by this, this AND this project via pinterest.

I Can statements: I Can draw a self-portrait with my features in the correct places. I Can draw a sea creature realistically.

Day 1: To kick off the project we looked at portrait photographs that were taken underwater and discussed what looked the same and different as above water. 

I showed them this video of Wyland painting underwater to connect back to Wyland. How freaky and awesome would it be to paint underwater!?

After all this chatting we got to work drawing the self-portraits. I did a draw along with them up on the SMART Board to help guide where to put features and how to draw the snorkel and mask.

Day 2: I checked out a large variety of sea animal books from the library and had them look through the books and choose a sea creature they wanted to draw. Before they added it to their portrait they had to practice drawing it using the books and attempt to make it look more realistic. I really pushed drawing from the images and not from their minds. This was a little difficult of a concept for them, but by the last group of 2nd graders, I finally found the right way to describe what I meant. When their practice was done I gave them their portrait to add the creature to. Nearing the end of class we came back together to talk about what good coloring looks like with crayons and how to achieve it so those that were ready to color could start.

Day 3: Refreshed our coloring discussion and then they got busy coloring. When the first few were done coloring, I showed my demo of using liquid blue watercolor to do a wash over the entire page. I really made a point to explain that any paper that was showing was going to turn blue so "bad coloring" would be really visible. Make sure they color the white of their eyes or their will possibly be tears when they turn blue....

  

These just make me so incredibly happy to look at!

"Ain't Gonna Paint No More" Self-Portraits 2015

Kindergarten and first grade started the year with probably my favorite self-portrait project that I do with this age group.... 

The portraits are inspired by one of my favorite books "I Ain't Gonna Paint No More!" written by Karen Beaumont, Illustrated by David Catrow, an Art Teacher book must have!

I've done this project a few times now so you can check out the original post with the day by day breakdown here and a modification I did here. This is the third time I have done this project and changed it again, this time to their names in the background.

This might be my favorite version with their name as the background although I did run into a few Kindergarteners who could not write their name yet because it was too early in the year.