Spider Webs

Kindergarteners are learning about the element of art, line.  I saw a spider web project on http://artteacheradventures.blogspot.com/ so I stole it and changed it!  I had the kids draw a large X in the middle of their 9x12 paper and use white crayons to complete the web with straight lines, broken lines, swirly lines, and zig zag lines.  Then the students drew the spiders with oil pastels.

I wanted to keep working with the element of space and this also help reinforce my landscape vocabulary (horizon lines, background, and foreground) so we made cityscapes.  The students were shown many different pictures of New York City, they all showed different times of day and different times of year.  The students were encouraged to create their own cities that showed the times of day and the season, but also needed to show background buildings and foreground buildings.

Higher Level Questions

One of my goals for this school year is to improve my higher level questions and my essential questions for each lesson.  To do this I have been studying blooms taxonomy to help me prepare questions for each of my lessons.  I found this great link on Incredible Art Department that breaks down Blooms for art teachers...very helpful.

http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/Files/blooms2.htm

The essential questions for the Autumn landscapes project are:
How do artists portray space and time?
How do we create a landscape image?

I think writing essential questions are a real art form of their own.

Autumn Landscapes

For the past 2 weeks my first graders have been exploring the element of space.  They created autumn oil pastel resist landscapes.  The students organized their landscapes by using a horizon line and we discussed foreground and background.  They were suppose to put at least one tree in the background and at least one in the foreground.  I taught the students how to make "Y tree" which is when they draw branches on their trees instead of a lolly pop tree (which is just a trunk with a big circle on top that is suppose to look like leaves).  The students drew the trees with oil pastels and the next week painted over them with watercolors.

Kindergarten talks Kandinsky

This week the kindergarteners continued their shapes unit (which also happens to be an abstract art unit) by learning about Kandinsky and his concentric circles.  I thought this would be a good follow up to Mondrian.  Last year I had the students fold their paper into so they had 4 squares and draw concentric circles with oil pastel and black watercolor resist on top...blah blah blah.  I wanted to make it simpler this year no watercolors running low on black and I wanted some variety.  So I just had them draw the circles on black paper.  It was a guided drawing lesson since it is the beginning of the year and we have to hone in on our listening and following directions routines, but when they drew the circles I told them they could pick the area on the paper to draw them, overlapping was ok (of course you must demonstrate what overlapping is) and they could make an artistic decision of how thick and large the circles could be.  I thought I got some cute results and best part it was a one day lesson...no trying to read kindergarten names to hand papers back the next week!