Week4

Week 3 I was on vacation, so my co-teacher took the reigns solo.  And then this past week, she was on vacation, so I was alone with the kiddos!  It was an awesome week. Our theme was story telling, which meant that lots of books were read, and lots of art was created! This one is going to be a long one, because I had a lot of favorites this week!

Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae is an adorable picture book about how a giraffe who thinks he can't dance. There are many great ideas all over the internet (and on pinterest) for creating these lovely giraffe pictures...I picked a few of my favorite things from various sources, including techniques from For the Love of Art...and added a few things of my own! After reading the book, they created their backgrounds using tints and shades! Students painted a moon with white, then added rings of progressively darker blue around it. They added splatter (everyone's favorite!) with white for stars. After our lunch break, we came back and busted a move.  Ok, not really, but we all took turns striking a dance pose, so that we could practice drawing stick figures in that pose.  Afterwards, students chose their favorite pose to draw their giraffe in. We discussed giraffe characteristics and what shapes they could use to draw them. After they drew a giraffe they were proud of, they transferred it to yellow construction paper, outlined it, and added details with markers.  Next they went back to their backgrounds and painted on some green for grass and added texture marks with the backs of the brushes. When all was dry (the next day) they glued their giraffes in place. They were all so proud of the finished projects...which looked fantastic!

(A lot of them decided that dancing giraffe's deserve hair...who am I to crush creativity? They are so cute!)

Besides reading stories, we wrote some of our own...in picture form.  Words were not required but could be added.  Students created a storyboard that had a beginning, middle, and end. They could use 3-6 frames to tell their story. For the backgrounds, we used a paper that we had created with some extra time earlier in the week using bubble painting. The bubble painting didn't work out quite right (Maybe the paint was too old? Maybe the consistency was off?) but the papers were nevertheless bright and beautiful, filled with abstract blobs of color!

Another story we read was The Very Busy Spider  by Eric Carle.  We spent some time creating all sorts of painted papers in stations.  Webs were created by rolling marbles covered in white paint around inside a foil pan that held their black paper.  Green papers were created using green and yellow paints: they painted a white piece of paper solid with one color, added design lines with the other, and then scratched more designs in with the backs of their brushes.  the blue papers and orange papers were created using shaving cream and acrylic paint, which I used before in this lesson: Van Gogh. After all papers were dry, we used shapes to create our spider, glued them to white paper, which we then cut out and glued to the webs. Beautiful!

 Our Self portrait for this week was painting ourselves on canvas as something we wanted to be (or wished we could be) in the future! We talked about facial proportions, and the students drew their portraits on paper. Once they practiced and had an idea, they drew them on canvas. We discussed mixing colors to make the secondaries, reviewed shades and tints, and I taught them how to mix a skin town and brown. They went to town! They used only the primaries, black, and white to create these lovely paintings. Even the youngest (a kindergartener) did a terrific job mixing colors!

And finally, another one of my favorites was creating a scenes. They folded a paper to create an X, then holding the paper so it made a diamond, they drew the floor/ground in one triangle, skipping the one next to it. The top two were their background.  Once colored and finished, they cut a slit from the bottom to the middle, slid the blank triangle under the floor/ground, so that it became a setting. Students could then add characters for their foreground.  Neither of these two are finished, this project took us to the very last second of camp.

We also created rainbow fish dishes and face pinch pots out of clay, and we did some tie-dye.  So much fun!