Hot Air Balloons

This is an image from a first grade bulletin board that I hung.  We made hot air balloon drawings.  I gave students a blue paper with four different sized circles on them.  We looked at images of hot air balloons and discussed what shapes we needed to complete our drawings.  Students used different designs, lines and shapes to decorate their balloons.

Pattern Pumpkins

This idea came from one of my former colleagues.  After reviewing different types of lines, second graders drew pumpkins with black crayon on orange paper and filled in the pumpkin sections with a variety of lines.  This was completed in one class.

Laurel Birch Cats

This is another lesson borrowed from www.artprojectsforkids.org. I used her step by step how to draw a Laurel Birch cat. 3rd graders drew their cats and outlined in sharpie adding different line designs and patterns. They used construction paper crayons on colored construction paper to color. When finished with their drawing, students created a patterned border using strips of construction paper around their paper's edge.

See Laurel Burch's art work here.

Name Grid

Second graders created a name grid by folding their papers into 16 squares. One letter of their name was written sequentially in each square until they were all filled in. We reviewed how to write bubble or block letters and colored them in. Black and white line designs and patterns were drawn in the background of each letter.

Name Tangles

To start of the year I did a variety of name design projects to help me refresh my memory of my 500 student's names. Third grade created name tangles, the idea for which was found here.

Students wrote their names so that the letters touched the edges of the paper. The first letter begins in the lower left hand corner touching the left side and bottom of the paper. The next letter touches the first letter and the top of the paper. The next letter touches the previous letter and the bottom of the paper and so on. I then had students paint their letters with thick black lines. The next week they filled in the negatice space with different patterns and line designs.