Week of 9/5/2022 - Self Portraits with 2nd and 3rd graders

 I began our first art rotation this week with 2nd and 3rd graders! It takes me a few weeks to get used to seeing the students in their new grades :)

2nd grade stduents looked at the content and pictures in the book "Just Ask" written by Sonia Sotomayor and illustrated by Rafael Lopez. They followed up by circling words on a paper that had adjectives to describe themselves. Students looked in a mirror and followed along with step by step directions on how to create their self portrait. They outlined their drawing and wrote the adjectives with a black Sharpie, matched their skin color to the Crayola skin color set and added watercolors to the background.

I had the opportunity to meet the brilliant Rafael Lopez in person, listen to him speak and watch his demo on how he simplifies images to create his abstract versions. I can't wait to show my students the below photos! 

2nd grade student working on self portrait!

 

Inspired by the work “Synecdoche” by artist Byron Kim, 3rd grade students started their first rotation creating self portraits. 

 

 

Students drew themselves, observed their skin color in a mirror and matched it to the 20 piece skin color set. They added colors to their hair, eyes, lips and watercolors to the background. 

Students were given a  survey that they used as a scaffold to add text with black Sharpie.   

 

Week of 8/29/2022 - Collaborative art

2022-23 school year is here! We had a heat advisory this first week and welcomed back students in 90 degree weather!

 

Students in grades 3-5 participated in a collaborative artwork inspired by contemporary German artist Thomas Heinz.

We looked at examples of his works and engaged in a class discussion about what we observed. Students noticed that there were different colors, the stems were different shades of green and were bending in different ways, the flowers were pointed in different directions, they were arranged such that they formed a square and that the stems were different lengths.

I gave each student a 6” black square and every class worked with a different color scheme. Students drew and cut out flowers from 3 paper pieces of the same color, and 2 from different colors. They arranged their pieces to explore flowers pointing in different directions before gluing them on. They added stems using metallic markers and glued their square on a 12”x18” black paper.

 

                                                                                              

I created groups of 6 12"x18" papers once 6 students glued their 6 squares on it as I knew from last year that this height would work best for the wall in our school auditorium. I taped the 6 pieces with painter's tape so it would be easy to see how and where they could be hung on the wall. I ended up having 11 columns of 6 12"x18" pieces and used t-pins and staples to fix the pieces to the wall. I added a gold border to go with the metallic theme of the works!

 400 student works were put together to create a 6 ft.  X 16.5 ft. display.