OCTOBER HIGHLIGHTS

One more week to go before the end of the first marking period!  Our students have created an amazing amount of work in the art room already.  Enjoy the highlights from the past couple of weeks.

Kindergarten completed their Line Unit with a lesson on Modern artist Piet Mondrian.  Ask them if they can tell you how we said "Mr. Mondrian" in art class!  This lesson introduced them to horizontal and vertical lines, as well as the primary colors.

Speaking of primary colors, below is also the start to their Primary Color Birds.

First Grade worked on Lines at a Circus.  The pieces are created from watercolor, marker and colored pencil.

Second and Third Grades closed their unit on Line with their own versions of Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night.  For this assignment, they created their own kinds of cities or towns.  They used crayon to complete the town, oil pastels to make their stars, and light blue tempera to make swirls in the sky.

The class was sooo excited to do their Form unit, because it meant time for clay!  Second grade was introduced to portraits by having the third graders review how to create a correctly proportioned face.  Second graders created a correct portrait, while I allowed the third graders to make an abstracted portrait this year.

Fourth Grade wrapped up their Line unit with an assignment I called Line to Create Shape: Still Life.  They began by drawing from observation a simple still life.  They painted it using watercolors and then outlined the shape of the objects with Sharpie marker.

To wrap up the month of October, I introduced the students to working with chalk pastels.  We are creating a harvest pumpkin scene.

Fifth Graders finished their first large assignment, where they studied Value, which is the relative lightness or darkness of objects.  Here is a viewed of our class board, displaying all of the charcoal drawings.

We've now moved into a very exciting unit on African masks!  Students are currently designing their own masks, based on characters they have created.  They will be making the three-dimensional masks over the next couple of weeks.

Sixth Grade has done an impressive job with their Mexican Folk Art unit.  After learning about a few different folk arts throughout Mexico, they took the traditions of fun, joyful skeletons from Dia de Los Muertos and turned them into contemporary scenes.  I tasked them with learning how to draw the human figure in correct proportion - something I have taught my college and adult students!  I am so proud of the hard work they put in.  The pieces are due this week, and I can't wait to post them in next week's blog!

Speaking of "I can't wait" for my post next week, Seventh and Eighth Graders are also finishing their major project of the marking period this week.  They have created Tonal Landscape paintings.  The concept we studied is atmospheric perspective.  They created their own landscape drawings, which they painted in flat value ranges.