Kindergarten: Rainy Day Self-Portraits

Well, it's a dreary day of rain in Northern New York today, accompanied by Day 2 of DDI Camp.  That's Data Driven Instruction for those of you who may have not been forced to use it yet!  The concept behind it is understandable, but try to get two art teachers from different schools to meet for the first time and to agree on content to cover in their classes by the 10 week, 20 week and 30 week mark?  Ha, yeah right!

So, since it's a rainy day today, I'll leave you with my kinder's last project of the school year.  In alignment with their NYS Listening & Learning strand of "Seasons and Weather", we did these spring time portraits.  We discussed what the weather is like in spring (lots of rain!), what happens with the trees and flowers (they start to get leaves and bud!), and what a self-portrait is.

I took a different route with the kinder's for this project when demonstrating how to draw their body.  Usually, like with my pattern cow project, I would demonstrate one step at a time and have the kids do the step on their own paper before moving to the next.  This time, I demonstrated how to draw the umbrella and then had them do the umbrella.  Next, I showed them how to draw their entire body, starting with their head, the neck, their shoulders and arms, torso, legs and feet.  Then, I let them go to town!

We put in a horizon line (always important and something I stress!) and added good details for spring time.  This all happened in one class period.  The only thing I didn't allow them to do was color the sky, which is usually against the rules!

On the second day of the project, I gave each student a straw and we went over proper straw etiquette (no spitting at others, if you drop it on the floor get a new one, etc.).  I had the students turn their papers upside down and I then went around to the best "Mona Lisas" and gave them a few drops of blue ink on their paper.  Students blew through the straw to make the ink run and look like rain!  Once they were done with the blue, they received a few drops of turquoise, rinse, repeat and done!

Kindergarten: Four Seasons Project

A week or two back, I posted about one of the projects two of my kinder classes were working on: four seasons trees.  Both classes finished these before the spring break, so here are the results!  This project was great because it incorporated a lot of different things: printmaking, painting with tempera, reviewing how to paint a realistic tree, reviewing the four seasons, talking about Monet and his cathedral paintings, AND it correlates with the Core Knowledge listening strands for kindergarten (plants and seasons & weather).  That's a lot of birds with one stone!

All things considering, they did an okay job gluing their trees in a somewhat neat frame.  A few had to start over because they wanted to glue the trees right onto the four corners of the black paper.  We also had to "break the rules" of gluing for these.  Since the papers were curled from being painted on, I had them put a line of glue around the entire paper.  We then practiced looking at the clock and following the second hand all the way around one revolution while holding down one tree at a time.

Kindergarten: 4 Seasons Project (Picture Heavy Post!)

Here is the plan for that Four Seasons project I am doing with the kinders, in conjunction with Monet.  As I said before, some teachers stepped up to the plate and read or will read a book about an artist during read-a-loud in class.  Two kinder teachers chose Monet.  When they came to me and asked who a good, easy artist might be to cover, I asked what they were learning in class.  Currently, they are working on the seasons and weather unit from the Core Knowledge listening strand curriculum.  Right away, I knew Monet would be a good artist for them to read about.  He loved to paint outside, he painted in all types of weather, seasons, and times of day.  

So, this project will span out over the course of 4 days.  The first two days will revolve around reviewing what trees look like in the four seasons, and painting a background for each tree.  We'll also paint a tree, without leaves, on each background.  This won't necessarily take up a whole lot of time each class, but I'm using the rest of class to really teach and push cleaning up with paint to the kinders.  They're really good at cleaning tables now, but now we need to work on cleaning brushes and paint palettes.  In fact, Phyl over at There's a Dragon in my Art Room just did a post about clean-up, and it's fantastic!  I already do some of what she suggests, but I may take a few other pointers from her!

Anyways, here is what the students will be doing on days 1 and 2:

Day 1 will be the winter and spring trees...I do the demo first on how I want them to paint the background, and then they do it.  We did both backgrounds first, and then went back in and painted the trees.  I did not give the demo on painting trees, because they should already know how to do those 'y' and 'v' trees we worked on in the cherry blossom unit.

Day 2 will be the summer and fall trees.  Backgrounds are pretty similar, but I'm going to have them add some textured clouds, I think, for the summer tree and instead of doing light blue and white in the fall sky, I'll have them do light blue and dark blue.

Now here's the fun part.  I've seen bubble wrap printing all over Pinterest.  This particular pin is what really inspired this project.  On day 3, I will set up stations around the room at the tables.  Each table will be a different season.  We will write the seasons on the back of each tree so students can take the correct tree to the correct station to add the leaves/snow.

Winter trees will have white snow...I'm going to change the shape of the bubble wrap for this one so it's not a circle but a rectangle so it looks more like snow and less like white leaves...

Spring trees will have green leaves and pink buds...

Summer trees will have green leaves...

And obviously fall!

When I made these prints, I used the block printing ink that I have.  I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with the results, especially with the green.  I may change it to regular tempera paint.

On the last day, day 4, I'll have the kiddos glue these all down onto black paper.  I think one class will glue them down in a straight line, winter to fall, and the other class will do a 2x2 setup.

Up and Coming projects...Kindergarten

Whew!  It feels like I fell off the face of the earth for a few days!  Besides being super busy with my YAM activities, I took a personal day on Tuesday.  It was meant to be a relaxing day spent with a friend of ours, however it ended up being a sleep-all-day-because-I'm-sick day! :(

My husband and I did manage to make it out to Watertown in the afternoon just so I could get out of my germ-infested house.  We bought some paint to paint the second bathroom and the hallway and I bought my outfit for pop art day on Thursday!  I'm SOOOO excited to wear my outfit!  Check back tomorrow to see it and hopefully the other great pop art outfits faculty and students will wear tomorrow!

Anyways, I want to share with you some of my up and coming projects that I have just started.  

Firstly, Kindergarten:

One of the Kindergarten teachers chose to teach her students about Eric Carle as part of my read-a-loud YAM activities.  These projects below are from my first year of teaching.  Back then, I thought these were awesome...now?  I want to hide my head in shame! So, I'm going to revamp this aquarium project to incorporate Eric Carle's techniques and his seahorse book. While I'm not going to use print-out coloring sheets, I am going to have the students use a tracer for this project. 

  

Students are going to start off by painting the plates with blue and white paint.  Then, they will paint their own grass using green and yellow.  When everything dries, they will cut the grass apart and glue it on the inside plate.  They will also paint a small piece of paper using fluorescent pinks and reds, and tissue paper.  When that dries, I'll have them trace two seahorses, cut them out and glue them to the inside of the aquarium.

Lastly, I think we'll add some real sand and seashells to the outside.  Class C and my special needs class started these yesterday while my sub was there, so I'll have some results to share soon!

The other two kindergarten classes will be doing a project based on the four seasons.  Their teachers decided to read about Monet.  Since he liked to paint outdoors at different parts of the day, I thought it would be a good way to talk about Monet in class, as well as connect with the Common Core listening strand.  

I haven't quite nailed down the project I'm going to do with these kinders, but I did give them a 6-square drawing test last class and I was very surprised at the number of students who resorted back to the rectangle tree with a green cloud on top!  I asked them to draw a tree in winter, spring, summer, fall, a flower, and a rainbow.  Out of the two other kinder classes, I'd say only 3 students used the 'y' and 'v' technique we practiced with the cherry blossom trees!  Good thing we're going to review it!