Primary Color Art

3rd grade overlapping (loosely inspired by Mondrian) primary color line collage

1st grade Primary color superheros *most of these are not done yet-these are the few that I have*

 Pre K4  primary color paintings

-it's pretty amazing to hear what the kids who are painting them tell you what  they are of. I get things like "It's an airplane".

ART CLUB!

I have 70 members of art club. YIKES... in a good way :) They are so lucky I'm a softy and didn't say no to anyone which is why I now have art club 5 days a week.

We are painting  15 artist chairs for our fundraiser is February! We did 8 last year and it was a huge success and they looked amazing.

So far we have sanded and primed the chairs. This week we worked on picking our artists and sketching designs on the chairs in groups.

They we so happy to do manual labor. NOT. 

"When do we get to paint?" - Everyone 

How I stay organized part 1

1. Sketchbooks

I love the idea of free choice for the early finisher but I hate the idea of that art work ending up in the trash. I came up with the idea of 3 hole punching a file folder and using brass paper fasteners and PRE 3 hole punched copy paper to make inexpensive sketch books. I used them all last year and have them again this year. The kids look forward to drawing in them and can't wait to take them home at the end of the year. I have a printed label on the front with their name and class

They are stored by class in magazine boxes, and the kids know they get their sketch book when they are done with their project. 

2. Canvas/Painting rack

My dad made this for me, It has saved me SO much room...I can store  about 30 canvas, or silk screens on here.

3. Color coded  construction paper storage

This is for scraps that are neat rectangular/square shapes most are 8.5 X 11, but some are smaller. No ragged cut up pieces.

3. Color coded scrap storage

One box for primary, secondary + pink and another for black/white/brown. These are scrapes used for collage

4. Cardboard storage

One box for neat pieces of cut cardboard.  Another for corrugated, more crafty pieces

Art starts with LINE...

I started the year off with LINE. Here is some of what I did with various classes

This is an outfit I wore one day.

Kindergarten, and Pre K4 "walked the line" meaning I drew various lines in chalk from the gate and looped them around, basically in a circle around the prek building and back to the art room for them to walk on. The lines changed colors each time the line style changed (straight, zig zag, curley, wavy, dashed, dotted, bouncy, diagonal)

Then we came back and did a review of what lines we saw. I'm trying this new thing where we do a beginning, mid and end of the year assessment on a few skills, one of which is lines SO I made different packets for PreK and kindergarten. PreK had traceable lines and blank space to try on their own and kindergarten had just blank space. I drew line on board and wanted to see if they could mimic it. Mixed results. Will see how it goes in January.

Pre K 3 didn't do the walk the line, I drew the drawings from "Harold and the Purple Crayon" in the parking lot and we went on Harolds adventure with him. So as I read each page to the kids we went to each drawing on the ground. It was really fun and the kids had a good time. 

The pictures didn't come out great due to the shadows on the ground this is the best I could get :(

too bad you cant tell what is happening in this picture ha

Then we went in and did straight line, zig zag and wavy line assessment, with a purple crayon of course!

1st Grade did a fun project I saw on Pinterest.

2nd grade did blind contours, 3rd did implied movement using line, and 4th is still working on theirs

5th worked on line design cubes- *These are not the best pictures*

Older kids saw this cool line video

Dress to teach

I have been experimenting with coordinating my outfits with my lessons to reinforce them. It has been working surprising well. I not only get to have a little more fun with work attire but I get to be creative and make lesson specific outfits.

One of my major art room pet peeves is when kids have their names of the front of artwork, so I made theses shirts:

I wore one every day the first week of school

they were also shown in powerpoint along with this one:

The kids were shown several examples of how to NOT write you name on your art work and then one good example. The key is to NOT make me make this face because you didn't follow directions.

****the front of the shirt is suppose to represent the front of the kids paper (Artwork) the back of the shirt is the back of the paper (name and class) 

OH and today I was dressed like a pencil (I made the shoes)

 To tie it in I showed this  Pencil music video not totally educational and I don't know how I feel about the song but the kids LOVED the video...