Bird's nests!

Fantastic first grade bird nests on branches!

Some stuff we collected from the park:

The nests we created from all of the sticks, grass, leaves, fun nature things, (and pieces of that strange brown paper that I have oodles of from my recent bridal shower gifts):

And eggs of course!

(Model magic painted with tempera.)

The backgrounds were collaged tree branches on watercolor resist.

 The result is a bird's eye view of a nest resting on a tree branch. 

I hot glued the eggs on to the nest and the nest on to the branch image. 

 Beautiful!

Peacocks!

I will write another post about both my art night event and the Power of Art program- but in the mean time here is my newly completed first grade peacock lesson.

 The head and body crop was cut out of blue tag board, 

then we glued on wood pieces to start our patterns.

 

 Our beautiful peacock color palette:

Coffee filter - rainbow parrots

Kindergarten students each painted two coffee filters as a color wheel or 'color pie' as we called them.

We made the parrot bodies separately- paying attention to the eye and beak details as well as the feather patten on the bodies. 

We cut the 'color pies' (coffee filters) up to make them into rainbow feathers and attached wings and tails! So fun! And adorable.

one day lessons- Penguins!

Penguins at the beach?!

Ipods, beach towels, sunburns, beach balls, sunglasses... so much fun!

Each student cut out a tall semi-circle (semi-oval) shape, glued that down along with an orange triangle and added on the rest with crayon. 

I left this as a sub lesson... penguin pyramids. Super cute.

I left a how to draw a penguin poster I made as well. 

Birdhouses with basics

Beginning of the year- Kinders & First graders practiced lines, cutting, shapes, texture/rubbings, basic color-mixing/painting....

and made these cutey birdhouses. 

They are all hanging on giant trees in the hallways. 

Mola-inspiration: Clay coil birds and yarn painting

My friends went to Panama this winter and brought me back two molas!

I used them as inspiration for my fourth grade project. We just finished them up and it went really well. I was inspired by the use of lines and wanted to teach the kids how they could apply their understanding of coils in a new way (other than making a coil pot).

After our class getting snowed out three weeks in a row we finally got started!
The students first did practice drawings of the birds and how they would create the shapes out of coils.
We used model magic to make the birds, when they dried I glued them to mat board.

The next week we painted the birds with tempera paint mixed with acrylic gloss.
We re-examined the use of continuous lines and spirals in the molas.

Then we painted lines on to the mat board and then began to glue down yarn designs. I wasn't sure how much yarn we were going to glue down but after one day of work on them I decided to encourage  the students to really fill in the spaces with yarn as much as possible.

The textural result of this project is fantastic. The clay becomes three-dimensional in a new way and the feel of the yarn is such a strong contrast to it. The class took a few minutes to experience how you can actually feel the pictures and the use of lines when you touch the pieces with your eyes closed.

*Due to my traveling to the classroom and wanting to glue the bird down to the board we used model magic.
I think this would be a cool lesson to do with regular clay though- creating an animal or design out of coils.  Especially if you were to attach the coil creation to a slab tile or some kind of base.

Paper Mache Peacocks

These peacocks are so precious!

We used paper mache for the body and head of the birds, egg carton cuttings for the eyes and beak, tag board collages for the tail feathers and wings, chop sticks for the legs poked into the body and hot glued, and clay for the feet.  I also had the students paint the birds by experimenting with mixing blue, green, yellow, and white to create various turquoise mixtures.  We collaged the tail feathers with tissue paper and feathers. 

Please note I led this project with a group of home-school students over the course of three two-hour classes (not in my 30 minute traveling public school art class).  

Big-eyed Owls

 I cut out sets of eyes and beaks from egg cartons for this project. 

The egg carton eyes were hot glued to the construction paper. 

The students designed their owls and traced the in sharpie.

Then they painted the owls with combinations of brown, red, orange, yellow, and white.

After the owls were dry the students added on details and retraced some things with sharpie. 

They also filled in parts they weren't able to paint using the multicultural markers so that they could have various browns to use. 

So cute!