Celebrations

Winning the Corn Festival Race
1st Grade Student

I love this celebration artwork because it makes you visually anticipate what's going to happen next.
Kindergarten Student.

Happy Day
4th Grade Student

This is the celebration of the departure of the Titanic.
3rd Grade Student





Concept: Celebrations
Essential Questions:
Why do we celebrate?  Who celebrates? How do we celebrate? How does art help us understand celebrations from other cultures and our own?  Is it important to celebrate? Do celebrations bring us closer as a whole?


That's how we started this lesson, by looking at celebratory artworks throughout history and sharing our own stories of celebrations.  I tried this lesson with various classes from K-4th.  I must say it was successful at each grade level because the students were able to connect the concept of celebrations to their own life experience and what is important to them.

I Give You My Heart

Don't you love how K and 1 students just throw themselves into their art?
   It was all smiles and anticipation as soon as the kids saw the enormous Jim Dine heart on my screen.
 Today they were going to paint a heart for someone special.

 

link to Jim Dine source


 Process:

1. For Kinder, I lightly drew a heart to get them started.
2. We looked at Jim Dine's Month of June Hearts and noticed how each heart was just flooded with colors.
3. I demonstrated how to paint  in a sort of "scribble scrabble" method  to fill in the heart and then the background.  
4. Wait for them to dry about 5 minutes  (the kids just kind of waved their pictures around).
5. Use the chalk over the paint and blend with your fingers.  

Tips:
Limit the colors to about  3, otherwise they may get muddy.
These are 9x12 on watercolor paper.
A wonderful thing about this lesson is exploring the potential of materials.  With that said,
use paper that can take a beating because they will keep going and going and...



  

Incised Pop-Ups

Pop -ups have such an enduring fascination.  The techniques we used here are not complex, but the transformation from two dimensions to three almost seems magical.

We used index cards and regular scissors.  First, everyone made all 7 of the pop-ups shown below (just to get the hang of it).  The ones you see above were new designs created by the students.

Fold index card in half vertically or horizontally.  Cut where you see a dash line and crease where you see a solid line.  It's important  to crease in both directions to really "set" the crease. We used the handle of the scissors to smooth the crease.   Open the card and just play with it a bit to get the pop-up.  

Favorite Tree

Kindergarten Watercolor Trees

I found myself walking around with a smile that couldn't be erased.  Every painting had a story poured into it.

We began by talking about nature and how throughout history artists have been inspired by it.  We looked at various artworks with trees and shared thoughts on how the artists may have felt about them.   We shared  stories of special memories with trees and moved forward with the painting.

Imagining Underground Worlds

In this lesson the students worked as artists to imagine an underground world or setting.  The question was how could they, as artists show this place. We discussed how artists can use space and viewpoint as tools to communicate their ideas.  We looked at and discussed the quilt Mother Earth and her Children which you can see here,  it is such a fabulous piece to explore!  Another favorite part of this lesson is reading the thoughts and feelings the kids have about their work.  Having them write about it helps them understand their own work better and develop a true relationship with it.   As a viewer, it makes you go back and explore the artwork more thoughtfully by looking at the details and seeing things you failed to notice before.  Notice below what Rosaura wrote about the dad rabbit being afraid as he is watching the coyote; now look at the expression on his face.