The Artsy Fartsy Art Room: November 2013

Saturday, November 30, 2013

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Enjoy these Turkeys brought to you by students at McDill Elementary School!

I always find myself wondering if "Free Art" is the best option for students who complete projects almost an entire class period before the rest of the peers. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Free Art, but it usually ends is students making a mess only to have a bunch of cut up paper to show for it or colored tape covering a piece of paper. Just when I'm about to say No More...

I get stuff like this! Problem solving! Color! Teamwork! This is the Free Art I live for!

3rd Grade Students at Jefferson

4th Grade Student at Jefferson

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

District Office Art Display

Put up the displays for all 3 schools at Bliss, our district office, last week. Thankfully, I had the help of another teacher friend with an Art background and my McDill Principal. Almost 75 pieces of work got mounted and went up!

There is an opening in December that all of the families in the district, whose students have work displayed, get invited to. Really excited to experience this first one with them that night!

Kennedy Elementary Space!

Jefferson Elementary Space!

McDill Elementary Space!

6th Grade Fall "Pointillism" Trees

Sticking to themes, when the Kindergarteners and 1st Grade started their Windy Day Trees, and the 5th their Collaborative Tree, the 6th Graders started this project. While this Wisconsin weather was still nice, I took each class outside to sketch trees and observe how they are structured. At McDill, this was amazing because I have a courtyard through a door in my art room with picnic tables for students to sit at and draw. My other schools we just made use of our school grounds. The next time they came to art, I introduced Pointillism and George Seurat, whom happens to be one of my favorite artists. And while this project was not exactly Pointillism, it was a great way to expose them to art history and another form of painting. I was inspired by this pinterest post.

I was pretty impressed with students that put an individual twist on this and the variety ways they were drawn. No two were alike!

McDill Elementary...

Kennedy Elementary...

Really didn't want to hang work there because of the custodial equipment, but I'm running out of space!

Jefferson Elementary...

This student REALLY loves dragons....

4th Grade Skeletons!

This awesome idea for a project came from another Elementary Art Teacher in the district, Pam Somers. If you cannot tell already, I love using construction paper and cutting it to collage for different parts of projects. It is a pretty affordable supply and students do not seem to be intimated by it much like other supplies.

This one was SO fun to introduce. We have these really amazing miniature model skeletons in our classrooms and I found an awesome free app on my personal iPad of the human skeleton. I shared really cool skeleton facts with students and we talked about how artists, before x-ray machines, would dig up skeletons to better learn how to draw the human body (a fun fact my favorite art history teacher told me).

I created the sketching sheet below with multiple styles of skeletons to help students that lacked in drawing abilities still be successful. The biggie for this was communicating a profession or hobby by the things their skeleton was wearing or doing. For some reason, this was hard for a lot of students even with a huge variety of examples.

When they finished they did a little writing piece that included what their skeleton did for fun or a living and they added a skeleton fact that they found most interesting. Overall, project was very popular at all three schools with students and viewers in the hallway!

McDill Elementary...