Kindergarten Dr.Seuss the Lorax Art!

It's almost Dr.Seuss' birthday and the kindergartners listened to the Lorax!  We talked about how important the trees are and why we love them.  We made a "horizon line" hill and then crumpled up tissue paper and glued it down to make the truffula trees.  Then they made striped trunks and wrote "I LOVE TREES"

So cute and colorful and meaningful!

Oh, and just in time for the movie release this Friday!

The kids LOVED my drawing of the Lorax - it ended up being a helpful attention-getter as they walked in :)

I think they ended up being SO CUTE.

Kindergarten Car Washes with SEA MONSTERS! Book inspired.

I started this lesson by telling my kindergartners a secret...when I was very young, I was SCARED of the car wash!  Some of them giggled at this while some admitted that they too were once scared of car washes!  But then I told them that they are fun to me now!  What with all the water splashing and weird things moving around...oh, and the BUBBLES!  

So, we started with this fabulous book (click to go to amazon) 

The art project proceeded like this:

Day 1 - 45mins) Read book, get blue construction paper and stamp "bubbles" by dipping toilet paper rolls in white and blue paint!  Clean up, then if time, begin drawing car (we talked about how to build it with shapes)

Day 2 -45 mins) Talk about the art in the book and the imagination of the kids in the book who believed the car wash was actually under the sea!  Cut out the car and glue it to the blue watery background, then glue down pre-cut felt pieces and buttons to replicate seaweed, sea monsters, octopus and fish!  

I think they are darling, though next time I might have them cut out the car from black construction paper and draw the details with construction paper crayons.  

4th and 5th Grade Clay Rattles - Complete! and Successful!

Woo!  A SUCCESS!  Well, okay, maybe you will notice the top left one has a hole blown out of it - but all in all the whole batch of rattles survived the firing to be happily rattled and painted.  The kids were stoked about the end result.  

See my previous post about the prep and my PDF how-to that I made for the kids explaining how to make a clay rattle:  http://scarymaryart.blogspot.com/2012/01/clay-rattles-with-5th-grade-coming-soon.html

P.S.  Cultural connection to Maria Martinez (an ideal connection would have been a coil pot but the kids informed me they have done "SO MANY COIL POTS. UGH" so I switched it up :)  

Update!  2nd graders learned about CASTLES!  We looked at real castles (including some fun shots of the Harry Potter castle and the Disney Castle!)  We looked at how they are built and what their purpose was.  Then...I introduced that though castles are real, they are also in a lot of legends and lore...and our creativity ran wild with examples!  They were assigned to:

1) Students drew their castles on grey construction paper using pencils, then trace with permanent marker.

2) Then they cut out the castles and with a lot of one-on-one assisting we cut the doors and windows so they could open.

3) Then they glued it down (careful not to glue the doors shut) on a white piece of paper and the colored pencils were used to add all the fun details!

Here are some in-progress ones...a lot of the kids did standard rectangular shaped castles but these few changed up the shapes and one of my students even figured out how to make the towers look curved!  So impressive!

 One 4th grade class learned about the Chinese New Year (and how 2012 is the year of the DRAGON!)  We just started painting last week. This guy has a removable crown - so cool.

Lastly, as I posted previously, my 5th graders made clay rattles.  We learned about Maria Martinez, a required artist for testing - but most of them seemed turned off by the idea of making a vessel so I switched it up with this project.  Only one of them totally broke, and a few got some missing chunks but over-all a success!!!  And nearly all of them rattle! We painted with acrylics.

That's it for now.  More good things a-coming!

4th grade dog paintings inspired by George Rodrigue

First of all, thank you elementaryartfun for the lesson idea!!!

Finally, we're done!  4th graders learned how to draw and paint eyes and noses realistically on small pieces of paper.  When they were dry, we arranged and glued them onto large paper and continued the paintings!  This gave them the opportunity to focus in on those features in detail without getting lost in the BIG picture :)  

We connected this project with George Rodrigue's "Blue Dog" artwork, and talked about his work with the Red Cross and humanitarian efforts and the jazz community in New Orleans. 

I think the kids had a lot of fun playing with the colors and they all seemed to connect to the subject!  I hope they are as impressed as I am!  

Here are a couple of PDF files I used to help explain how to draw an eye, and then how to draw the dog's face once we glued them down to the big paper:

PDF for how to draw and color eyes

PDF for how to complete the drawing with big paper