Week of 11/11/2024 - 2nd and 3rd grades

 This week I was grateful for a parent volunteer who took 8 Amazon boxes home over the weekend to cut them into 1"-2" strips for a sculpture lesson I had been wanting to implement with 2nd graders! 

We used artist Ugo Rondinone's "Seven Magic Mountains" sculpture as our inspiration and discussed what we saw - the rocks stacked one on top of each other, the bright colors, how people could walk around them and how these looked extremely tall!! Some students had visited this installation and recognized that this was near Las Vegas :)

 

Each student was given a small cardboard base and 3 cardboard strips. They used a warm color paint stick to color one side and a cool color for the other side. Once dry, they folded their strips and brought it to me to hot glue the pieces. Once their strips were stacked, students used black and white tempera paint to create line and dot patterns while making sure their work looked complete from all sides. I love how these turned out!

3rd graders started on a weaving and motif making lesson - this is one of my favorite lessons to teach!!

We looked at an example of fabric with motifs repeated and had a class discussion about what we saw. Students shared that they saw patterns, they guessed this was a rug/ carpet and noticed the organic and geometric shapes in the example. 

 

Once done, I introduced the words cloth/ fabric/ textile and had students look at a piece of fabric through a magnifying glass so they could see how the clothes we wear are created from yarn that is woven. I also shared my Saree from India and a video of a weaver weaving a Saree on his loom.

Next we practiced drawing 10 different lines and 10 different shapes and combined them to create 4 motifs incorporating at least 2 different lines and 2 different shapes. We selected 2 of our favorite motifs to use in our woven work.

Each student was then given a piece of 18" x 24" construction paper folded in half with lines drawn 2 inches apart. They cut on these lines and started weaving 3 2 inch paper strips by going over and under and gluing the ends. We will continue this lesson next class.