Value Mixing Projects

   Fourth grade is working on understanding how to mix value with paint. They've learned about hue, tint, tone, and shade and have chosen a project to demonstrate their learning with. Luckily, our fourth graders have Chromebooks, so we use Google Classroom and I put all of the resources linked in this post on their GC for them to teach themselves how to create the projects while I circulated and talked with them to gauge understanding and assist where needed. They had three projects prepared for them, and a slide of other ideas in case they didn't like any of the prepared projects or wanted to challenge themselves more.

   I began with this presentation about value, hue, tint, tone, and shade and how to mix each value. Then students logged into their Chromebook to begin the project of their choice. The first project we talked about is based on artist, James Rizzi and his cityscapes. They had access to this presentation of examples of Rizzi's cityscapes and this video of me creating my example project, which is hanging on the whiteboard in the art studio. They were told that each building should be monochromatic and use the hue, tints, tones, and shades of the color chosen for the building.

   The next project, shown above with the image that inspired me and my example from the video, is value chevrons. They have access to this video to show them how to create the chevrons and mix values to paint them.

   The final project that was prepared for them is the value pyramids shown above. The first image is what inspired me and the second is the example I created in this video for the students. 

   I have started this project with two of my four fourth grade classes because we didn't have specials on Friday for me to see the other two. So far I am happy with the students' progress overall and am looking forward to seeing how these projects turn out. 

Fish Reduction Prints

Fourth grade is about to start their printmaking project. I am going to try reduction printing for the first time. I took photos of my process, intending to create a storyboard for the project before I purchased Camtasia and started making videos. With my full load, I wasn't able to find time to make a video, so I used the photos for a slideshow style video of the process. I still don't have my microphone working, so I plan on narrating in person with this video to show the kids how to create their prints. 

Molas

I received a generous donation to my art department last year. Part of the money was invested in the video editing software, Camtasia. I have been having fun learning the software and creating demo videos for my students. I love it because I can be sure that I am giving all the classes the same instruction (let's face it, by the sixth presentation I'm sure to forget stuff!), and I save on supplies by only making one sample instead of seven! Plus, our district is a Google district, so we have our own YouTube channels through the district which saves the videos in case I want to use them in future years. Here is a video I created for a fourth grade project making Molas out of felt after introducing them to where Panama and the San Blas Islands are and telling them a rated G version of the Kuna Indians history.

I feel I should mention that I pause and fast forward the videos based on student interest. 

Raven: A Trickster Tale-Fourth Grade

Fourth graders focused on shape, balance, and symmetry while creating drawings of Raven: A Trickster Tale. 

After hearing the story, we used guided drawing to create the ravens. We talked about shape, balance, and symmetry. Students were asked to make the wings symmetrical and the body balanced using shapes.

With the birds fully designed, students chose a color scheme of four colors of crayons to color their shapes and detail on their raven.

When the birds were completely colored students used black watercolor to paint over the whole bird and make the crayon stand out. They cut out their birds when they were dry.

Finished projects were assessed for symmetry and balance. Students also filled out this assessment in Google Classroom.

See the full lesson plan here. 

Follow the Line-Fourth Grade

Fourth graders read Follow the Line by Laura Ljungkvist and talked about line in art. I created a quick presentation about cityscapes and discussed color. By fourth grade, they have been introduced to most of the color groups, so I reviewed primary, secondary, warm, cool, analogous, and monochromatic color groups and asked them to choose one group to use for their buildings. 

When the buildings were glued to the paper I demonstrated how to use one line to create all of the details for their row of buildings. We looked at the illustrations in the book again and then I showed them how to do a couple of buildings and some details in the sky. They used UltraFine Sharpies to draw their lines. 

Our district has gone 1:1 with Chromebooks in grades 3-8 this year, so I have been using Google Classroom for my assessments. It is the BEST thing that I have done for my classroom in years. I create the assessments in Google Forms, using the Quiz setting. This allows me to set the answer key and a points value to each question. After the first class takes the quiz I go back into the form and send the results to a spreadsheet. I then sort the data by first name and color code by class. Easy peasy and all graded for me! All I have to do is put the grades into my gradebook. I use iDoceo on my iPad for my grades, seating chart, and planner. Here is a copy of the assessment I created. Feel free to copy it and use it.

See the full lesson plan here.

Egyptian Masks

Fourth graders just finished these amazing Egyptian masks. We used mask molds and plaster to create the face. They painted the whole mask gold and then added details with other colors of paint. 

To finish up their masks, they used construction paper to create a headdress. I cut up scraps of gold paper that the first graders used for their gold collars and let them cut shapes to add to their headdresses. 

See our whole galleries here and here.

Egyptian Sneak Peek!

I've been working on samples for my Egyptian lessons and am very excited to get started! Here is a sneak peek, we are currently flying to Egypt, learning about the country and designing the concepts for the projects. 

Moroccan Tiles

My fourth graders started our African studies in Morocco. They learned about radial symmetry that is found in Moroccan tiles and then created their own radial design using a design sheet. 

Once they were happy with their designs, they were asked to go over their lines again, as dark as they could. 

Their dark designs were then taped to their tile with the pencil side facing the tile. They scribbled on the back of the paper as hard as they could to transfer the image onto the tile. Next, they used Sharpies to color their design.

To finish the tiles, they glued a piece of felt to the bottom of the tile and I sprayed them with spray Mod Podge. I had to be very careful to spray a tiny layer first and let it dry before spraying 2-3 more thin layers. If the layer got too thick, the Sharpie would bleed. 

Assessment

I don't know about all of you, but the word assessment makes me cringe. I'm more open to it than I was when I first started teaching, and do find it useful at times but in general miss the time in education when I could just sit and create some fun artwork with my awesome students. However, with the teaching climate the way it is, it is necessary to show that our students are learning-even in art. With 650-700 students depending on enrollment, I had to find a way to easily organize all of these assessments. I used to have half sheets of paper for most projects, but have recently found even easier ways to organize assessment. I went to one of my media specialist and told her I was looking for an app that would allow my students to manipulate images and email the results to me. After looking at a few options, we found the perfect app for this process. PicCollage.

PicCollage allows the user to load as many pictures as desired and layer them as they see fit. I have two assessments currently ready for my students to use. The first one I will use with first graders to show that they learned foreground, middle ground, and background. We are touring Africa this year, and they are working on landscape chalk drawings of the Sahara. They will be putting three items into their landscapes; one in each plane of depth. They can choose from cactus plants, camels, or pyramids. For their PicCollage, I put a picture of sand dunes in first and tapped on "select as background" to lock it into place behind the other images. I then searched for each item, adding "with transparent background" after the name; for example, "camel with transparent background." This allowed me to find images that would fit easily with the picture. Once they were put onto one iPad, they were in the camera roll for all of them and it was just a matter of pre-loading the images I needed. Here's what the image looks like when the kids go into the app: 

They can increase and decrease the image size by pinching and move the items to the foreground, middle ground, and background. We talked about how things in the foreground look larger than things in the background, so they will be able to move them to something like this: 

Here's another one I will be using for third and fourth grade, both of which are learning about radial symmetry of Moroccan mosaics and tiles (more on those later).

Before

After

When complete, students can simply email me their finished image and type their name in the subject line of the email. I can grade them whenever I have time, from any device that has internet!

The other new assessment tool I am using is Google Classroom. I am very new to this, but have been getting my 3rd-5th graders set up on it. I will post on that once we finish our first projects, so I can give some tried and true tips.

Asian Art Study: Russia

I realize that I have posted some of these projects before, but in looking at my schools' Artsonia galleries, I am so proud and happy with the way this year went that I thought I would break up the year into the units of countries that we studied. If you don't already know, I decided to focus my teaching on one continent each year starting this year. I chose Asia to start with and honestly, I think I could have spent all year just in Japan! The curiosity and genuine interests the students have shown in each country has been remarkable. Here is the first country we "flew" to; Russia. 

This was my kinder's second project of the year, and their first time painting with me. They learned about Kandinsky, concentric circles, and watercolor painting techniques along with my painting expectations, and how to clean up in the art room.

After completing their Kandinsky paintings, my kinders used strips and squares of paper to create these Russian tiger collages inspired by an image I found on Pinterest. The full lesson is found here. 

First graders did two projects in Russia. This is their study of landscape and the focus of the lesson was foreground, middle ground, and background. For full instructions to teach this lesson, visit my inspiration here. 

First grade's second project was Babushka (aka Matryoshka) Doll Drawings. We looked at a set of dolls my parents brought me from Russia and noticed how they get smaller, that most of them are holding something and there is a lot of patterns on them. I got out a variety of sizes of bottle caps for them to use to trace the heads and gave them pointers for drawing the details. Students were asked to use at least three different drawing media to color their dolls. The full lesson can be found here.   

Second graders looked at Russian architecture and compared their traditional buildings to what they see in Wisconsin. They noticed the elaborate designs, dome tops, and bright colors. They then drew their own version of a Russian building and were asked to color it with crayons, colored pencils, markers and oil pastels using their "artist brains" to choose the best medium for each portion of their building. They then watercolored the sky.

Third grade looked at the art and life of Russian artist, Marc Chagall. They learned that his paintings are dream like interpretations of stories of his life in Vitbesk. They wrote a story with four parts and then illustrated it using four different perspectives and at least three different drawing supplies. 

Like first grade, fourth grade looked at Babushka Dolls. They created clay versions using two pinch pots and connecting them to make the hollow "peanut" form and then painting them. While the clay versions were drying and being fired the also created a drawing using colored pencils. They were allowed to use the drawing as practice for the sculpture, or to design the two project differently. 

The fifth graders learned about Kazimir Malevich. They looked at the progression of his art from realistic to Cubist to the creation of Suprematism. Next I tried my hand at a modified choice project. I allowed students to either create a Cubist image using oil pastels or a Suprematist collage. Regardless of the media, students were asked to show movement, balance, unity, shape, line, and color in their composition. 

Indigo in Elementary

Last week at one of my schools I did Shibori (Japanese Indigo Dying) with first through fifth graders. It was only two days of art classes, and ten classes. True Shibori is done with Indigo, which is extracted from the Indigo plant. There are many ways to bind fabric prior to dying it to create different patterns on the finished piece. My favorite part of teaching it was reliving the wonder of the process every time a new class came to art. When a fabric is dipped into the vat, it comes out green. A weird, ugly, puce-y lime green. As it oxidizes, the oxygen turns it blue before students' very eyes. I love the "oooh!" I heard around the room all day when demonstrating. One dip will leave the fabric a very light shade of blue, and each dip and oxidation after that will make it a shade darker. 

I had two vats going. It was so much fun, but also very messy and stinky! I thought I would take a moment to share how I apoached the project and what I will do differently when I do the same project with my other school after Winter Break. 

To begin, I purchased Indigo kits from Sax. At the school that has already done this, I have about 230 kids, and we used two kits; one for each vat. I also added some gloves that I got from the nurse because there is only one set in each box. However, I told the kids they only needed one glove, and only if they were using the marble technique. 

Next, I decided on which Shibori techniques I wanted to teach the kids. There are so many to choose from, I decided to limit it a bit and showed them three. First was using rubber bands to hold marbles in the fabric. It doesn't matter if they are actually floral gems, which aren't round and won't cause students to be running after rolling marbles all class period. When dyed and rinsed, this technique leaves white circle/square shapes on the fabric. 

I also talked about using clamps. I explained that a Shibori artist would have a variety of shapes and sizes to chose from and showed examples of different ways to fold the fabric to get different results. We used clothespins as clamps.

Finally, I knew I wanted to do Irashi. It's my favorite type of Shibori. A month or so before the project I sent out a request to parents, asking if anyone had any scraps of PVC pipe they'd like to donate. I wasn't expecting results, but a dad brought in a grocery bag of pipes! I was (and still am!) completely excited about it. I showed the kids different ways to fold their fabric and how to wrap it around the pipe and scrunch it down, emphasizing that the tighter they wraps the string the more defined the white lines would be in the end. 

All in all we used clothespins, rubber bands, floral marbles, string, and PVC pipe for binding the fabric. I kept these in a Rubbermaid style bin that is designed to go under a bed-it was perfect with how long it was. 

Now that you have your supplies, consider your room. Indigo vats are stinky, messy, and have to be kept in an air tight container when not in use. I dug around in our storage area and found some empty containers. The ones with lids were just too big to use as the vat and the smaller ones didn't have any lids. Of course. So I created the vats in the smaller containers and stored the smaller containers in the larger ones with the lids. I just put all the binding supplies in another container and stacked them all in the corner for the two days I was not at that school (I share a room at that school and wanted them out of the way for the music teacher). 

While considering your room, consider how you will direct traffic to minimize mess. I only have one sink in each of my classrooms, so unbinding at the sink was not an option. There was enough of a buildup of people just waiting to rinse. I put an empty tub next to each of the vats and instructed the kids to transfer their bound fabric to the empty tub and unbind them in the tub, leaving all the wet binding materials in the tub. They then should give the fabric another good squeeze over the vat before moving to the sink. 

Next consider how to protect your room. I bought a cheap plastic dropcloth and taped it to the counter and spread it out onto the floor. The vats and tubs for unbinding were on these counters and then they moved to the sink in the photo. The rinsed fabric then got put onto a laundry drying rack that my principal donated, as my drying rack has too big of holes between the wires for these pieces. I was diligent in talking about how to make sure there was no dye left in the fabric before putting it on the rack, and also with wiping under the rack throughout each class. 

My classes are all back to back, so my final challenge was figuring out how to unload the drying rack between classes-especially as one class is typically waiting to come in as the last one is leaving. I solved this by having a clothing iron in the room. By the time the first few pieces were done oxidizing I had finished helping the kids that needed additional support with binding and I had some kids finished with the project. The kids that were done were now my "experts," and were available to help the kids that had questions dying while I kept an eye on the drying rack. As pieces turned completely blue I pulled them off the rack and ironed them. They were still a little damp, but were dry enough to stack and keep off the drying rack. As a bonus, the kids loved seeing what theirs looked like after it was ironed!

Now that everything is in place, as soon as you set the dates for dying, inform parents! I didn't think to do this until it was too late, and has a few upset (but very supportive, "don't change your teaching!") parents. I have already sent out the dates we will be doing Shibori with my other school, and it isn't until January. I requested that they make note of the dates their children will be dying and dress them in clothing that would not be upsetting to stain. I also have aprons, but they never seem to cover enough of the kids' bodies to make much of a difference-and they're cloth too so sometimes things just go right through them. I asked our office staff to put the dates in our school newsletter, emailed the classroom teachers the dates and asked them to put them in their class "peek of the week" letters and sent out an Artsonia newsletter. When we get back from Winter Break, I will also put the dates on my art class Facebook page and my school class pages. I figure I'm covered with all these communications.

It was a fabulous project. I loved how when the kids would enter the room all I would hear is comments about how it smelled. But every single class answered the same as they left and I asked, "well, was it worth the smell?" Every class unanimously yelled, "YES!"

Color Wheel Spirals

I got the idea for this project from a former colleague. Her gallery is here. I love the color wheel, but realize that not all people do. I love that this project allows for students to mix their own secondary colors but isn't a boring, generic color wheel. I also love adding the iPad step at the end to add interest for students that might not have been excited about the painting step. 

Here is the video I created using a free trial version of Camtasia. I love Camtasia. If I was in the market for a $300 software, it would be Camtasia. However, I'm not, so now I'm experimenting with iMovie-which is free-much more my price range!

I am doing this project with 4th graders, and they are looking great so far. A couple of classes are done or nearly done painting and will start Sharpie next class. My other school will be starting these next week. 

Completed painting.

This and the following photos are after using the Percolator App.

Student work in progress.