Fall Reflections in First Grade

I love to do this reflection lesson with my first grade artists every year. They are so bright and beautiful! To achieve the reflection, they fold the paper and press it together after they paint each item. You can't wait until the end to fold over because the paint dries and will not transfer over.
Here are some examples of their finished work.

Fall Birch Trees by 2nd Grade

     The second grade created these great birch tree paintings this fall. They had a lot of fun. First they painted the white stripes for the tree trunks. When they were dry, they added yellow paint for the leaves, and added in a bit of orange to add interest. Finally, when the paint had dried, they used black crayon to add details to the bark and outline the trees.

Van gogh Inspired Winter Trees by Seventh Grade

First of all, my original inspiration for this lesson came from a wonderful blog, http://marymaking.blogspot.com/2011/12/winter-landscapes-with-van-gogh.html. If you are looking for some great art lessons, check out Mary's blog!!!!

I love the way these turned out. The 7th grade students were asked to create a winter sky inspired by Van gogh's Starry Night. They worked on getting color, texture, and movement into their skies. I tried not to over explain or over instruct. I rally wanted they to come up with their own unique perspective of what the sky should look like. The next week, they added the bare winter trees and snowflakes. They are just so beautiful. Here are some finished ones...

Second Grade Fall Layers

So I broke out the extremely messy chalk for my second grade art class. This lesson originally came from the blog, Art Projects for Kids, http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2007/12/fall-pastel-landscape.html. Check out the link to see the steps to creating these works of art.

Even though my younger students find it hard to not end up covering themselves in chalk somehow, I love the end results of this lesson and do not want to give it up. My apologies to all the parents who had their kids come home with chalk-covered, used-to-be white shirts.

After much drawing, coloring, and blending, these are some of the final masterpieces created by my talented second grade...

Fall Trees by Grade 4

I found this lesson in an Usborne Art book. I talked to the students about perspective before we tackled this one. They VERY LIGHTLY sketched a tree to one side of their paper and divided the paper between land and sky. Then they tried to paint in leaves that were smaller on the tree and bigger as the got closer to the bottom of the paper. This gave the impression of leaves blowing toward the viewer.
I love how the fall-colored leaves "pop" off the page with color. They worked hard using the watercolor paints ,which are not the easiest of mediums to control.
Here are some of the final results:

Great work, Grade Four!