Week of 5/1/2022 - 4th grade underwater art, 5th grade tessellations

This week 4th grade students created underwater artworks inspired by the works of artist Yelena James. After observing her painting as a "hook" via class discussion, students responded that she uses organic shapes, overlapping, textures, value and a multitude of colors.

We practiced created ten different textures after which students created 6 different organic shape of different sizes using overlapping.

They outlined shapes with black Sharpie markers, filled each shape with a different texture, colored them in with oil pastel and finally used water colors for the background. 

5th graders created tessellations inspired by Islamic architecture - we looked at an example from Alhambra palace in Spain and students observed that the shape were tightly packed and repeated over and over again.

I showed students how to fold a black 12"x18" pieces of paper twice in hotdog style and twice in taco style to create 16 rectangles. After numbering rectangles 1-16, students created arrows going in the same direction and realized this process created arrows going in the opposite direction as well! They use rulers to create their lines and used metallic markers to create line patterns inside their arrows. Why metallic markers you ask? They just look so great on black paper and look dramatic!!