Week 20 and 21 - Half through the school year

Preschool students made mittens this week using colored squares and glue. Next they painted the background and added snowflakes! With temperatures in the single digits this week - it was a great day to make mittens!

Kindergarten students created a winter forest. These birch trees and red cardinals make a great addition to our hallway walls. Our birds were made using 3 simple shapes - circle, oval, and triangle. The birch trees were made using 4 long white stripes of paper.  The last step was to add snow using a q-tip...

1st grade students learned about weaving and created these fun alligators/lizards

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Second grade students drew themselves and their shadows. We discussed shadows and what silhouettes are. I have to comment on have some of these second graders are super good at designing clothes - fashion creative!!!

3rd grade students painted our state bird, the cardinal.

4th grade students used oil pastels, construction paper, and glitter for this mixed media artwork

Fifth grade students learned about artist Claus Oldenburg, an american artist who is known for his pop art sculptures. We discussed his "Burger" sculpture and then students got to be creative an design their own burgers. They could add anything they wanted to their burger, as long as it was food. Some of these have some crazy things in them - crabs, pizza, cupcakes, fried eggs, candy, fish, and spaghetti.. This project was a mixed media collage. We used yarn, felt, tissue paper, and construction paper.

Week 19 - Short week in the art room...

This has to be the shortest school week in school history! 3 Days off for the holiday break, 1 school day, and 1 snow day = only 1 day of school!

Kindergarten students and I made hot coco in art class today! We didn't make real hot coco but made an art version of it. We drew our mugs, added some steam using cotton, and the final touch.... added real marshmallows to the "hot coco".  I usually open a bag of marshmallows and let them get a bit hard before giving them to students to glue to their art (this makes them less appealing to eat), but I didn't do that this time! I gave them all fresh marshmallows and they smelled delicious! I had to remind them over and over that these were for our art :)

3rd grade students completed their self portraits. This was a new project that I tried this year. I wasn't honestly sure how they would turn out, but I am happy with the results. It is always scary trying a new project because you never know what will happen. There are times when I experiment and the vision I had does not always turn out, which is always hard to explain to my students. This simple self portrait project was much harder to teach than I expected. The hard work paid off.  

4th Grade students had fun using white chalk on black paper today. We created a winter wonderland and added a neat "frame" around them using chalk. As the snow lightly fell outside today, we created this fun 1 day project and they turned out really neat!