Mondrian Spider Web

Here are some lovely spider webs created by my talented first grade class...Mondrian style.

"Pumpkin Art" by Kindergarten

The kindergarten completed two fun pumpkin art projects last month. One was art work for the poem, "Five Little Pumpkins". The other was a large painted jack-o-lantern. Both projects were a lot of fun!

For the first, we all read and recited the popular pumpkin poem, "Five Little Pumpkins". Then, they drew a fence onto 12"x18" black paper using a white crayon and then cut out and glued 5 orange pumpkins on their fences. They drew the cutest faces on their pumpkins using sharpie markers. Finally, they added details and design to their art using metallic paints. They look great!

For the second project, they created large jack-o-lanterns. First, they drew the outline of their pumpkin. Then they painted it in using a variety of orange paints (regular, flourescent, gold, etc...) all mixed together. The pictures do not actually do them justice. They had a cool shimmery look to them. Then, they added faces to them using cut paper. I love the mouths! So cute! Again, they had a lot of fun...

 

"Haunted Houses" by Fourth Grade

So Halloween has come and gone, but my 4th graders took longer than expected to finish these haunted houses and I really want to share them on this blog. I love the way they turned out. PLUS, even though you can't see it, they used cool glow-in-the-dark paint on parts of their paintings. These areas look like they left them white in the pictures below, but the white areas glow when they turn off the light. They looked awesome when we turned off the lights!

First, I talked to them about starting with a basic house shape and then adding on to the sides and top of their houses. This seems to be the easiest way for them to create a large haunted house. It stops them from trying to envision and create a whole big house right off the bat. This way they start small and add on little by little until they have their desired house. It is also nice that they don't worry too much about perfectly straight lines because imperfection works so much better if a house is haunted.

In addition to the glow-in-the-dark paint, they painted in the rest of the house with basic watercolor paints. They work very hard on these are were excited about the project. I love them...

Bone Letters by Fifth Grade

This is a great, fun Halloween art lesson. I do it every year with the fifth grade class. I originally found it on the art blog, Art Projects for Kids. This is the link to the lesson, http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2008/09/bone-letters.html.

This lesson involves teaching the students to create their names using a combination of different bone shapes. I show them some different shapes and give examples of how they might combine them to form different letters. Then they create their own combinations for each letter of their name. I also do a lesson on shading and light sources. We turned off the lights and shined a flashlight on some white foam geometric shapes to observe where the shadows were cast. Then they tried to give their letters a shaded look.

Here are some final pieces of their artwork. They did a nice job...