Toucans: trying out tools and techniques!

Toucans are colorful and beautiful creatures, and are exotic and mysterious to us in this part of the world. All of the colorful toucans you see in this post started out as mystery drawings - drawings created by listening to clues and drawing along with the teacher to discover what the drawing will turn out to be. Grades 1-5 experimented with this lesson using different types of media - it is interesting to see the different looks created by the variety of materials: black and colored sharpie, tempera paint used as a drawing medium, watercolor paint, twistable crayons, oil pastels, and water based markers.

You can find out more about my mystery drawings here.

Fish weaving, kindergarten

Kindergarteners learn the over and under pattern of weaving using a tropical fish as our inspiration. We look at some colorful examples in nature before making our loom “bodies” and weaving the paper strips.  We start by drawing the biggest oval we can and cut it out, saving the scraps for the end. While the students are coloring the faces, I go around the room and fold the papers and draw the lines on the body that become the warp strips, or the cuts that we weave through. The kids cut the lines and open up the papers, then weaving begins. We finish it off with some construction paper fins and tails and more shapes and patterns. Construction paper crayons are great for this lesson since they hold their color on a non-white paper.

Sunflower still lifes in 1st grade

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the artists we learn about in first grade - Vincent loved the beautiful sunny yellows in his village in France. He lived in a yellow house and often painted beautiful yellow fields and glowing golden cafes at night. His sunflower still lifes are some of the most well-known paintings  in the world.

We began our versions with a simple vase and table, sketched in pencil, then added a layer of liquid tempera - on the first day we filled the vase shape and the table as well as the brown circles that would become the sunflower centers, adding black dots in the middle for the seeds, which made them for just a moment look like floating chocolate chip cookies. :) We used dry paper towels to wipe off our excess paint instead of using water cups - this helps keep the paint from getting too watery.

The following week, we added petals, stems, and a pattern on our vase. The final step was to create that brushstroke-y texture all around the picture which makes Van Gogh's paintings so exciting and recognizable. We hope you enjoy our colorful and lovely sunflower still lifes!
If you would like a step-by-step "How To" for this lesson, please visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store. 

March Monday savings in my TpT store!

Every Monday in March, my Teachers Pay Teachers shop will offer a 20% discount on everything, in honor of Youth Art Month. If you are planning an art show, I just added a free handout to help students select and prep their best art for the show.

I also recommend some of my color activities for March, like the Color Poem and Discover Color - a great way to add some art to your academic classroom, or vice-versa!

I'd love for you to stop by and shop :)

2nd grade stitchery: constellations

My second graders learn about space in their classroom, so when it came time to do some sewing in the art room, we used constellations as our theme. We found our zodiac constellation on a chart and traced the shape onto a piece of paper mesh made by Roylco, adding some tape around the edges to prevent the mesh from unraveling.

Next we learned how to tie a knot and thread our yarn needles using a paper threader and went to town! We finished surprisingly quickly, so next time I think we may make them a little larger - for these I used half-sheets of the paper mesh. We colored the backgrounds and for a finishing touch, we glued some sequins in the background to give it that outer space feel.