Murals Are Finished -A month has passed since our last update and it's been a BUSY one. Our painting unit is in full swing. We had to pause for a couple of weeks for school events but we'll get back to it next week. I can't believe I only have 5 weeks left with this amazing group of kids. The next two weeks we will be working on an independent painting. They have building their painting and color theory skills in order to produce a painting of their own.
I have been asked to speak at a summit on Higher education in the Dominican Republic, so I won't be present the week before Thanksgiving break. When we return after thanks giving break we will only have three weeks left to work on a collage from our painted paper experiments. 3rd, 4th and 5th finished their amazing collaborative murals. PHEW. SO MUCH GLUE! I am getting to know my new little artists and I can't say enough about them. Such amazing and excited kids! We are ALMOST finished our paper quilt murals. I have a lot of cutting, glueing and assembly to conquer. The kids really impressed me during critique. I asked them to brainstorm what we would write for an artist Statement. I was overwhelmed by their responses. "The quilt is just like us. Unique pieces that make one big, wonderful whole". "Its colorful and is a little piece of us in a big piece of art". "We really got to express ourselves in color".
Several kids wanted to re do their piece once the saw the quality and care their classmates put in. It's a regular part of the learning process! I'm excited to see how their craftsmanship will change on the next piece! 3rd Grade - Cut paper quilt 4th grade - oil pastel quilt 5th grade - Radial design We've started using our centers. My students are so excited to work on the painting center, as well as, the drawing and still life center! Filled with pumpkins, fall leaves, dinosaurs and insects, they made some interesting still lives and water colors! We hit the ground running this week with learning and creating. Most of my students were unfamiliar with the color wheel and Primary/secondary colors. We had a crash course but will reinforce some basic color theory in the coming weeks. I introduced our "centers" to the students in our choice based system. Starting next week, we will have drawing, painting and origami centers set up for use. The students looked at three famous paintings using mostly primary and some secondary colors. Each grade picked a painting to copy in the painting center. The students will practice mixing colors and filling in the canvas as a group. When each grade finishes their canvas we will start a new one! We will be creating giant paper quilts! Each student will contribute a square of two. They are all using analogous colors on the color wheel. Third grade will be using cut paper. They learned how to divide a square into multiple sized triangles, how to us a ruler and worked on several designs for their paper quilts. Fourth Grade will be using oil pastels and mixing colors on grey paper to create their quilt. Fifth grade will make radial designs similar to a mandala. We had an amazing first week with introductions and color experiments. I can’t wait to get back to it, later this week when we start tackling some color theory in preparation for our first project. The kids were so creative and engaged. I shared an introduction of myself and showed them some of my research in the Guatemalan highlands. They had so many questions about the Maya people and the tradition of building “alfombras” from dyed sawdust in Antigua. The presentation took twice as long as I expected. Here are a handful of pictures from our experiments.
Introductions and Investigations -I'm so excited to start my first week at Hilliard Elementary. I had a few more things I wanted to accomplish in the classroom but unfortunately Dorian had other plans. I hope all of my students in Dorian's path faired well. This week I will be introducing myself to the students and introducing the areas of the art room. I'm a professional artist, teacher, researcher, and masters student at the University of Florida. In the art room I will introduce them to the idea of "choice based art". I am in the process of creating "stations" or "choices" within the art room. Each week, I will introduce a topic and we will experiment, investigate and learn about the topic. It is my belief that students learn best when they are challenged to discover the answers on their own, rather than being told the solution. Once the students have mastered the techniques or concepts, I will open a choice based station where they can create. This week we will be discussing Primary colors and secondary colors. Rather than tell them the names of the colors in discussion format, we will discover what these colors do. Students will have access to several experimentation stations - 1) Bubbles and color - Primary colors of paint will be mixed with bubble solution and students will blow bubbles onto a large class paper. 2) Dropper and paint - At this station students will used watered down tempura paint and a syringe to "suck up" various amounts of primary colors, shake them up, and drop them onto the paper. They will record the results. Ex: 1mL yellow + 1ml red = ? 3) Spray color - Students will use primary colors of sidewalk chalk to spritz color onto paper. 4) Self portrait - Students will create a small self portrait for the front of their folder 5) Name tag - Students will make a name tag to be used in class for the year (I'll have 750 students! Thats a lot of names to learn). We will let these pieces dry and discuss the results for next week! I will attach pictures of their for next week! If you are interested in why I love choice based art Here is a great video! |
Crazy about Color!Taking on the responsibility of being Hilliard Elementary's artist in residence is an exciting honor. Knowing that Hilliard hasn't had art previously, I knew it would be a big responsibility. I decided this year's theme would be "crazy about color". We will be learning all about how color works in art. Color theory is an exciting adventure. We will learn through experiments, investigations and of course, through making. Archives
November 2019
Categories |