Famous African American Glue Prints

This lesson works great if you're school does a Black History Month Assembly or celebration.  Each student chose an influential African American out of a hat.  They were given a contour drawing of their person- similar to a coloring book page. 

Paul Cezanne Inspired Still-Lifes

January's Artist of the Month was Paul Cezanne so my Second Grade Class looked at a bunch of his artwork.  I explained that he was famous for his still-lifes.  

The first thing we started with was the background.  We made our line separating the Wall from the table.  The Wall was made doing a crayon resist.  The students used Crayons to draw a design on their Wall and then painted on top using watercolors.  If you have never done this before what happens is, the wax from the crayon repels the watercolors, causing the crayon to show through and the watercolor paint to fill in the empty spaces creating a nice effect.  

The table was created using actual fabric.  

100 Days of School!

To Celebrate the 100th day of School, I had my third graders do a Group Project.  I'm always a little apprehensive about group projects because there's more of a chance of mess and high volume but I was extremely impressed with my third grade class!  

 

I had the students split into groups of four and then delivered a tray filled with 100 items to each table.  I explained to the students that they would be doing a collage and the only rule was that all 100 items had to be included in some way.  

 The students were given markers, scissors, glue and tape and were told to get to work!!

SnowGlobes

My second grade students created snow globes filled with winter scenes.  

  Students traced coffee can lids to create circles on their sketch paper.  Students were required to make two different sketches of winter scenes.  They could get opinions from their classmates as to which was the better picture.  Acetate was placed over their final sketch and it was traced onto the acetate with permanent marker.  An additional coffee can lid was traced about one inch to the right of the snow scene circle.  Two lines about 1 inch apart should be drawn to connect the two circles.  

The Little Engine That Could

The Little Engine that Could inspired this fun project!  

My Kindergarten students have been spending the last few weeks working on Trains!  We read The Little Engine that Could which the kids really enjoyed and it sent such a great message- You can do anything you put your mind to!  So we set our minds to making great Train Scenes. 

The first concept we talked about was Line!  I asked the students what Kind of Lines Mountains were ... We eventually worked our way to Zig Zag Lines.  We used our fingers to make zig zag lines in the air.  THe students seemed to really enjoy this .  NOw for the Hard part- Making the lines on the paper!  After a little adjusting, we got our mountain Lines in!  To try something new, We used Coffee grounds to "paint" our mountains.  Boy What a strong aroma that made!  The Background was decoupage Tissue Paper, and the Track was made with textured paint rollers.