Creature Collection by Kindergarten

When I was a kid I loved to collect bugs in jars. I remember my dad using nails and a hammer to puncture holes in the top of an old glass pickle jar and we would find spiders, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawlies to keep in there for a few days! I remember one time we kept a spider for such long time it spun a web in the jar. We used to feed it bugs! We had a snake for a while too. We always let them go in the end.

I talked to the kindergarten students about the childhood act of bug catching! Then they created their own artistic representations of what they would want in their jar of bugs. Here are some...

It's Raining, It's Pouring! by Kindergarten

I love when young kids draw self-portraits. These ones done by my kindergarten art students are particularly cute. We drew the basic steps together, but they each made unique additions to their portrait. They drew them in pencil, then traced over their pencil work with sharpies. Next they filled it in with crayon. Finally they added watercolor paint raindrops which we sprayed with a water bottle to make them bleed down the paper. The results are adorable...

These pictures don't do their art work justice. They are great, but in person they are even better! If you will be visiting the school soon, they are hanging outside Mrs. Martin's kindergarten room!

Bird Houses by Grade Seven

My seventh grade class gets the honor of my first spring art lesson post of the year. (Although I have at least one more winter one coming!) They made these cool birds house paintings. We added a little 3-D effect using folded paper to create the roofs. (I looked it up to be sure...it's not "rooves", but that is also acceptable). Anyway, the students also used wooden craft sticks to create the sides of their bird houses. After they looked through books of different types of birds and sketched one inside their house, they painted the details with watercolor paint. We discussed how by controlling the amount of water on their brush and in the paint wells they were able to control the thickness of the paint on their papers. They used a wet on dry technique for this project. Here they are...