3rd Grade: Mondrian Unit (Part 3): Glazing Our Cubes

On Friday, my last class of 3rd graders glazed their cubes.  This process took a total of two class periods to complete.  I pulled out my tubes of Spectrum Raised Accent colors in black (of which I received when I ordered the Nasco Spectrum Tile kit last year).  I instructed students to paint over their carved lines with the black glaze, and then to paint in their squares.  When one side was finished, they rotated the cube and did the next side.  

If you remember from my first post in this series, students were able to choose from four different color families to design their cube...they didn't have to do just primary colors.  I set up four stations at my tables...one for each color family (primary, secondary, warm and cool), with two different glazes for each color.

One class's glazed cubes!  These were all loaded into the kiln and fired on Friday, just in the nick of time for art show set-up on Monday of next week!!!  I can't wait to get to school Monday morning to see them!  

And of course in my haste to get them loaded in the kiln 2nd period, I forgot to load my cube!!!

Part 1: Introduction to Mondrian & Color Theory Review

Part 2: Clay Cube Tutorial

Part 4:  Finished Cubes Coming soon!

3rd Grade: Mondrian Unit (Part 1)

Currently, my 3rd graders are in the middle of a Mondrian unit.  I've posted before how I've used Mondrian, and in this case, the final project is something new I'm trying out this year.  Before we get to that, however, here is how I opened up the unit.

This unit was started with a substitute as it was during one of the weeks I had to take my husband to his chemo treatments.  My substitute used my power point to introduce the works of Mondrian and to review the mathematical vocabulary that corresponds with Mondrian (i.e. horizontal line, vertical line, squares, rectangles, geometric shapes...COMMON CORE MATH!). 

Students then created these Mondrian animals on white paper using markers and rulers.  This was great practice for them on how to hold a ruler. 

Students cut out their animals and glued them onto black paper to make them look nice and crisp.

After the Mondrian animal project, I was back to introduce students to the final project, which is a clay cube project (something students are currently working on in math...3-D forms).  

On the front of this worksheet is color theory review.  These students already knew what primary, secondary, warm and cool colors were.  The complementary colors were a new addition.

On the back of the worksheet, students once again used a ruler to draw in their lines.  This is where I pushed students to not just simply draw a grid, as many of them did on their animal above.  We looked again at Mondrian's work and students realized that he used a variety of sizes of squares and rectangles.  The final aspect of this worksheet was that students had to color their cube using the color scheme of choice.  Mondrian used primary colors, but I didn't want to hold students to that color scheme, thus the color theory review.

Part 2 of this post will show you how we built our clay cubes.

Part 3 of this post will show you how we glazed our cubes. Coming soon!

Part 4 of this post will be our finished, glaze-fired cubes! Coming soon!

7th Grade Projects...

Wow...you'd probably believe me when I say I'm still trying to catch up on grading and getting organized at school three weeks later!  Quite a few projects were complete but ungraded by my sub at the end of my leave and 10 week grades are due tomorrow.  I've been cramming during my prep periods to try and get everything caught up so I could photograph and blog everything that has been done so far...so here goes!

When I left, I had started my 7th graders on a perspective unit.  Much to my dismay, the project flopped.  Well, it didn't flop, but they definitely didn't produce the type of work that I expected...more like their laziness didn't allow them to follow directions properly.  For the most part, they did understand the concept of 1-point perspective, but they did A LOT of complaining about it (even though they were the ones who suggested this as a project at the end of last year!).  From this, I have surmised that I basically need to do extremely simple projects with this group in order to keep my sanity intact.  Anyways, here are some of the better projects that were turned in from the perspective unit.  My sub did only do 1-pp and didn't attempt 2-pp with the students, of which I didn't blame her for not wanting to attempt.

If students chose to do a word, they were supposed to draw the word in 1-point perspective and then illustrate the word to look like itself...so if they did the word "building" the letters were supposed to look like buildings...if they did the word "fuzzy", they should have made the letters look fuzzy.  Unfortunately, they didn't understand that concept.

After completing the perspective project, my sub decided to do tessellations with them.  Despite how simple this project was, they STILL complained about it!  She decided to review color theory with the students.  Each student had to draw out of a hat and whatever color family they picked was how they had to paint their tessellations.  My sub graded them on having an interesting tessellation, tempera painting technique (painting each space opaque), creativity and the color family.  In the end, these projects did turn out really well...it just proves to me that these students do have it in them to use neat painting skills.  You can see the rest of the tessellations on Artsonia.