Huichol Yarn Paintings

Huichol Yarn Painting or Yarn Paintings are from the Huichol people who inhabit North Central Mexico.  The Huichol people originally made yarn paintings as an offering to the spirits to ensure a big harvest.  Now, the yarn paintings mostly serve as a decorative art form with their bright colors and symbolic images.  

Below my fifth graders designed their own unique yarn paintings with collaged backgrounds.  

             

The Crayon Box That Talked

In honor of Black History Month, I read the students the poem The Crayon Box That Talked  by Shane DeRolf.  This sparked a conversation about how important it is to treat people equally and how it is the uniqueness of people that make the world such an interesting place to live!  The students then use a mirror to draw their self-portrait and I encourage them to draw themselves doing something they love.  I have the students trace a crayon template onto colored construction paper and then together we draw the top and bottom of the crayon with guided drawing.  This lesson has proven great for first grade and am so happy I stumbled across it on Kinderart.com

"We Are The World" Michael Jackson

 As a first year art teacher, this was my first attempt at a group project.  I was very hesitant at first but very pleasantly surprised by the way my 6th graders worked together.  For the school's black history month concert,  I chose Michael Jackson as a focus in honor of his passing away.  My sixth graders were each given a different verse to Michael Jackson's "We are the World"  They were to make a sketch that really went along with the words or feeling of their verse.  Students got into groups with classmates who had the same verse as them, making the groups random.  THe students were instructed to look at each group members sketches and discuss which one they thought would work the best.  The students were then to make a final sketch together as a group.  THey could combine aspects from each of the four sketches or come up with a new one together as a group.

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Native Fish Art and Writing Contest

When the middle school science teacher came to me and asked if I would do the art portion of the Native Fish Art & Writing Contest with her class, I of course said yes.  I love teaming up with other teachers to teach a lesson- it really gives the students a better understanding of the subject matter.  

The sixth graders each researched their NJ fish and then brought their information and photographs to me.  I had the students do this project in two steps.  The background or environment of their fish in water color and their actual fish in colored pencil and glued on top.  Because these students haven't had art yet, it was a more controlled project and it makes their fish stand out!  

The backgrounds are to replicate the environment in which their fish would live. 

For the fish, the students were encouraged to press hard and light with the colored pencils and build up layers of color to produce a more realistic fish.  

Shadows and texture for the scales were added at the end.  

Although none of our students won, I think they did a very impressive job!

Joan Miro "Nocturne"

                    I wanted my seventh graders to do a lesson on artist, Joan Miro.  I wanted our focus to be BALANCE.  The problem was, I wasn't actually sure how to start off this lesson and inspire the students aside from showing them lots of examples of Miro's work. As I was struggling over this I began to think how Miro's paintings have always intrigued me because it seems as though he just made a bunch of scribbles and then made those scribbles into recognizable images- almost like laying out at the beach and turning the clouds into a dinosaur or tractor.

And then it came to me!  THe students would start out with a random line that filled up their entire paper and swirled and crossed over itself again and again- almost like a scribble line and then they would look at their paper and see what parts of their scribbles looked like and add to it.

While the students drew their lines, I called back two at a time to splatter their entire paper with paint using a toothbrush.  The students enjoyed this and it gave their backgrounds a more interesting texture.

Once the students had the lines drawn, I encouraged them to keep turning their paper so that they saw it from different angles.

The pencil lines were outlined in permanent marker.

For the painting.. I took the opportunity to introduce the students to color schemes and the principal Balance.  The students were using a color scheme similar to Miro's (red, blue, yellow & green)  A color scheme is a limited set of colors.  This is a good trick to make a painting cohesive and really have unity.