Bird House Collage

1st grade students were instructed how to draw a birdhouse using crayon before painting their drawings with tempra cakes. Students traced and cut out a bird shape, beak and eyes which they glued together and onto the birdhouse.

Tree Houses

2nd grade students created tree house collages. They began by painting a green strip at the bottom of their paper and a green cloud shape at the top of their paper. Next they used brown paint to connect the two areas with a "Y" shaped tree trunk. Students folded a brown piece of paper in half with the fold at the top and cut off the upper corners to make their tree house. The glued it onto the tree and used markers to add details to the inside and outside of the tree house as well as to the rest of the picture.

Watering the Garden

Another fun spring lesson from last year, Kindergarteners created gardens after reading Lois Ehlert's "Planting a Rainbow". THey traced, decorated and cut out a watering can. on a 12x18 sheet of paper students drew a garden with various flowers and other details. They glued their watering can onto an upper corner and added blue yarn or tissue paper from the spout.

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.

Value Drawings

5th grade students were given a selection of black and white animal photos to choose from. they folded the image in half and taped it onto a piece of drawing paper. Students then had to duplicate the image paying close attention to different values. Before starting this project we spent a class discussing value and practicing on a worksheet.

Jump Frog Jump!

This was a fun end of the year project I did with 1st graders last year. We read the story "Jump Frog Jump" to begin. Students were given two different shades of green paper. On one they traced a large oval and cut out a triangle shape to create a lily pad. On the other they were to trace a frog pattern. Students used oil pastels to add details to their frogs as well as watery details to a blue piece of construction paper such as waves, fish, plants, etc. They then glued the lily pad in the center and taped their frog onto the lily pad so that it popped up. Red strips were curled around a pencil and taped underneath the frog's face. Model magic was used to make a small fly which they colored with marker to glue onto the tongue.

Modigliani Style Self-portraits

After learning how to do a self-portrait using proper proportions, 3rd grade students are introduced to the work of Amedeo Modigliani. I originally saw this project on www.artprojectsforkids.org where I borrow many of my ideas from. Students began by folding their paper in half vertically to get a fold right down the center. They then folded their paper horizontally in half, also folding the top half down to the center fold and the lower half up to the center fold creating 8 rectangles. These folds were used as guidlines. We looked at the works of Modigliani and discussed the proportions he used and why. They drew a narrow oval along the center fold in the top half of the paper, the neck was drawn in the next section and the upper body in the last section. After adding facial features and hair, drawings were traced with black oil pastel (these are done on black construction paper). We reviewed how to use oil pastels and how to blend them to create new colors. Students had to blend colors to create skin tone and hair color. The oil pastels on the black paper made the colors very vibrant.