Picasso Paper Portraits

my coffee cup on the supply table like it is every morning.
Anyone guess whose portrait is on the other side?

It appears that last I left the blog-o-sphere, a few of my classes were beginning to learn about Picasso. Since many of my students have never had "a real art teacher" before, I try to introduce them to famous artists from time to time. I have really enjoyed using Laurence Anholt books as an introduction, so for this activity, we read Picasso and The Girl with The Ponytail.

We then talked about how cubism uses simple shapes and how Picasso would look at the front and the side of a face at the same time, and put it in his painting. We followed Phyl's steps at There's a Dragon in my Art Room. Thanks Phyl!

 
I managed to forgot to take pictures of the final products. We have had many events at school lately, and a few had to be rescheduled. At times I wasn't sure who was going to show up at my door expecting an art lesson. And as we all know, it takes a lot of preparation. So needless to say, juggling the schedule and preparing took priority over pictures at times. The 3rd graders loved this activity though! And its amazing how one class will take it to the next level, and the other wants to fly though it...

Up next, grades 4 and 2 and their adventures learning about Picasso

Sunflowers

I know reproducing "Sunflowers" by van Gogh is a pretty standard lesson. I have only done it twice in the last four years though, and I could not resist reading another Laurence Anholt book to introduce my second graders to the artist.

• first we read "Camille and the Sunflowers" then looked at van Gogh's "Sunflowers." we talked about what we saw in general, then narrowed it down to the elements of art. for the first class, we specifically paid attention to the shapes and lines.  one class thought some of the flowers looked like fuzzy donuts!
• we drew with black crayon on 12x18 manila paper. something that I think helped with the composition was asking the kids to draw all the flowers above the vase first, even having some go off the paper, then adding the stems. for some reason, I think because of a lesson we did back in the fall, my second graders love using overlapping. so when it came time to add the stems, they knew some would overlap before making their way into the vase.
• the second class we began by revisiting the painting and this time looking for as many colors as we could. the kids realized that the flowers were not painted with only yellow!
• with oil pastels, we began to add color. I went from table to table, demonstrating how to layer the oil pastels, and how to add all the little lines and different colors we saw, especially in the fuzzy donut :)

some kids really got into this lesson. so much so that they needed an extra class. about every six weeks I have a "choice" day for second grade. its an earned treat for good behavior. so what I have done the last few choice days is have the students who need more time on an assignment finish first and then pick a choice...

choices are things like "free" draw, using my how to draw books, sometimes a little "special project" with me (watercolor, extra scratch art paper etc.) art games like cloodle or "the word game" (I have a deck of cards with adjectives, nouns, verbs and places. the kids pick one of each to make a silly sentence and have to illustrate it) pattern blocks, crystal climbers and if I am feeling particularly nice, legos... again, it has to be earned and we have a chart to keep track of our good listening and behaving day. having never taught as young as second grade, its been a learning experience, but rewarding. I would like to take the idea of the earned choice and use it next year with other grades.

back to Sunflowers.... it totally worked out that we did this the week of van Gogh's birthday. our principal talks to us about "this day in history" during the morning announcements and I could almost hear the second grade cheer from down the hall when she mentioned it was van Gogh's birth anniversary over the loud speaker. a simple, yet awesome lesson. I can't wait to see what these little ones will be able to accomplish when they are older.

p.s. LOVE my new camera! can't stand loading and formatting pictures in blogger though. so frustrating!

ANOTHER snow day!?

seriously folks, I have not taught a full week of school since before Christmas vacation.

front yard in December

front yard this morning

we have had a snow day, two hour delay AND early release due to all this snow. my New Year's resolution was to get myself in shape and all this shoveling is most definitely keeping me on track!

since returning to school in January, I feel as though I have been playing catch up. I threw a few lessons out there to get us back into the swing of things, and now those lessons are taking weeks to finish with all the upsets to our schedule. I remain hopeful for the end of the year however. Here are my thoughts:

• grades 2 and 3: reading books by Laurence Anholt, and creating art inspired by the new artist. grade 2 has already learned about "The King of Color" and made scrap paper collages, fauve portraits and goldfish mixed media works.
• grades 4 and 5: a drawing unit... we started this past week with an optical illusion using line and shading I found on Art with Mr. E's blog. the kids are really stoked about it! I took the opportunity to introduce color schemes along with it, and even though the assignment will not be finished this week, its nice to have as a go to when I hear "I'm done, now what?" ... next week we are going to read Art & Max by David Weisner and learn how to draw a lizard; much like Max who wants to be an artist and through his misadventures, makes Art colorful... later, we will learn how to draw people and portraits. And take the portrait idea to learn about Modigliani and Picasso.
• middle school: I know I have a million ideas written down, but not too much is coming to mind right now... grade eight will be working on a value drawing in the hopefully near future... grade seven and six are working on Matisse inspired paintings and will be moving on to Keith Haring and (possibly) architecture, respectively. 

sadly, I have no photos of the awesome work we have been doing... I need to get better at that. and a new, improved, camera is on my birthday list! and recommendations?