Art to Remember Fundraiser

Mrs. Thomas and I had been working on a fundraiser for the art room this past month. Packets were sent home last Friday with the student's art work and information about the fundraiser.

Parents and guardians may order/purchase items through the Art to Remember company that will print the students art work on to a selected item they have available (water bottles, key chains, magnets, coffee mugs, tote bags, garden flags, ornaments, etc.).

Please have your child return the packet to school by Friday March 4th. If you do not wish to order any products, just mark the "NO" on the envelope and return to school (your child will still be able to take their art work home at a later time!).

If you wish to order, follow the instructions on the envelope and enclose a check or cash for the order.

Thank you to all the students who participated!

And thank you to everyone for support in the art room, I appreciate everyone who brought in bottles for our chihuly project at the beginning of the year, the parents that volunteered on Jump rope for Heart and Fall Festival days, all my 4th graders who brought in boxes and found objects for our project, and many many other things!

:)

Another Oopsie

Well, its been a while once again since there was an update, partly because we have hardly had any school it seems since December!

But the other problem is Miss Fravel did something bad to her digital camera...its almost too embarrassing to share. Also a little funny, so I will.

I was doing laundry one day, after having been a little sick and resting on the couch with a blanket watching movies until I felt better, I decided it was time to wash my germ covered blanket! My work bag was also on the couch, unzipped. My camera must have fallen out and some how become tangled in the blanket. I just grabbed the blanket, and threw it into the washer. No clanks, no unusual noises. It was not until I moved the blanket to the dryer that to my horror I see my precious digital camera at the bottom of the washer. My heart sank...and I felt kinda dumb for doing that. But I didn't do it on purpose, so I forgave myself.

I tried drying it out and everything, but its not working...I had a bunch of pictures on there too that I am hoping to salvage for the blog.

Until I have some extra dough, I am afraid there will be no pictures on my blog of student art work. So I will do my best to be as descriptive as I can, and hang lots up in the hall way for you to see if you're in the building!

Currently I have one of my favorite Kindergarten projects hanging out there, OWLS! I love them so much, the kids did a really good job. Every time I walk by the paintings of the owls, I just smile! In my head I have a cute title for each of the pieces :)

3rd and 4th graders

3rd graders continued the yummy noms projects by studying Wayne Thiebaud cakes and desserts. We created a still life were we designed our own cake, we had to think about lights and darks for shadows, and we practiced making ellipses to make our cakes look more realistic.

Here are some of the yummiest!

Meanwhile 4th graders were working hard on facial proportions in clay and color mixing for skin tone. Can you guess who?

Watercolor 101 Day (and clay fish!)

I introduced our Kindergartners to watercolor this marking period. We talked about whats different about watercolor vs. tempera paints. We reviewed good painting techniques. We talked about warm and cool colors and blending. Then I just let the kids go at it on some scrap paper to just test it out and get a feel for it before moving onto an actual project.

It sure was messy, but the kids loved it!!! So heres some pictures from our first day using watercolor :)

I am also sneaking in some old pictures into this post, from when we painted our clay projects! Some of our students lost their clay fish in the great kiln disaster of 2010, so I remade a bunch of fish so no one would feel left out the day we were going to paint them. The kids really enjoyed painting the fish, they really liked painting the inside of the mouth. We had to talk about how its 3-D so we really need to look all around it when we paint to get all the white spaces.

A Fun Fall Project

I made these paper bag fall trees with some 1st graders, they loved it so much I decided to have Kindergarten and 2nd grade particpate in the activity before Thanksgiving break too.

Heres some of us in action, thinking about what kinds of colors we see on the trees and thinking about what makes something a sculpture:

Kindergarten

1st grade

2nd grade

End of the second marking period!

Perhaps my new years goal should be to update the blog more regularly ;)

So we have had a busy second marking period and all kinds of fun in the art room.

I took some pictures of the 1st graders "Chilhuly Bowls" modeled after his Macchias.

These bowls were quite a hit at the fall festival night. As well as the 2nd grade leaf bowls, 4th grade clay portraits, and 3rd grade yummy pies!

Looking forward to more clay projects next year, sans the kiln disaster!

Some other projects we did 1st marking period

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the second marking period and another 9 weeks of awesome art projects!

Here's some other projects we worked on this first marking period, many are hanging the walls outside the art room!


4th graders worked on 'big' paintings. We focused on flowers, the students were introduced to Georgia O'Keeffe. They drew the flowers really big, and then we painted them trying to use darks and lights to create value. We also tried to use complimentary colors to help emphasize the flower and really make it pop!







They turned out great!




1st graders have been working on cityscapes and a watercolor painting. The cityscapes were abstract, we used tissue paper and paint to create the shapes of buildings. We talked about architecture and what architects do and we also talked about overlapping. For the watercolor painting we did a pig, we talked about the kinds of animals you might see on a farm. We also talked about foreground, middle ground, and background. I was also impressed because we used watercolor, and that can be messy, we really focused on good craftsmanship and the kids were so excited to learn we could make shades of pink by using thinned out red watercolor.






















Kindergarten had been working on paper projects to help develop those fine motor skills and to help the understand techniques for cutting and tearing paper, and of course using very little glue!








We worked on an initial collage, we talked about what initials are and helped each other figure out our correct initials. They also did a Kandinsky circle project where they cut different sized circles out of paper and had to glue them down overlapping different colors.









We had a painting 101 day, with surprisingly very little mess! The students learned about how to hold a paint brush, how to clean them, how to mix primary colors into secondary, and we just kinda played around a bit writing out names in paint. Just before fall break I had them practicing portraits and pigs so one of these might become our first real painting project. We also had an opportunity to work with modeling clay and real clay in the first 9 weeks making fish!