Andy Warhol Pop Art Hands

Andy Warhol Pop Art Hands

So far this year the Kindergarteners have experimented with creating different lines and shapes - now they are moving into color! I was so pleasantly surprised to see that so many of our Kindergarten friends already knew a little about color mixing. We read a bunch of books about how to make different colors and talked a lot about the primary colors - red, yellow, and blue. We discovered through experimentation that by mixing these colors in different combinations we could make orange, green, purple, and many colors in between!



One artist I have always loved is Andy Warhol, and he often used a lot of bright, vibrant colors in his paintings and screen prints. Together we read a book about him, called Uncle Andy's, and looked at some of his colorful artwork. We talked about what we saw, all the different colors he used.


The Kindergarteners traced hands onto paper and painted the inside and outside of the hands in different colors that they mixed themselves on a little mixing tray!

Once their paintings had dried, the students pressed their own handprints on top of their painted ones a-la Warhol's off kilter screen prints.

Pollock-bots

One of my goals for the art room this year is to bring in at least one (hopefully more) STEAM art project per grade level. The first glass to get to try their hands at some Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics integration was our third graders! After learning about how Kandinsky worked with line in his painting, we learned about Jackson Pollock's life, art and his art making process.

We read the story, Action Jackson written by Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan and Robert Andrew Parker and learned that Pollock make his paintings by putting the canvas on the floor, walking around and sometimes ON his painting and dripping or flinging paint from brushes and paint sticks using entire body! Sometimes people call his style action painting!

Students then created doodle and bristle robots using vibration motors, batteries, cups, toothbrushes and tape. Their robots had the ability to draw through motion. Students worked in groups and had to use lots of team work, problem solving to get their robots to create a work of art together.

After the students completed this project we were able to have an incredible reflection discussion about how art and technology came together and worked together in this project. We put together a display to share with our school about what we learned.

3rd Grade Kandinsky

To get the year going in Third Grade the students learned about Kandinsky's life and art, noticing his use of lines and shapes. We made a large list of all of the lines that the students were able to find for them to refer back to though out the year as they continue to work with lines and shapes in all of their art! We also read The Noisy Paintbox which taught us that Kandinsky had a rare condition, synaesthesia, which means he could experience sounds as colors and colors as sounds.

For their project the third graders listened to music and drew lines and shapes inspired by those they saw in Kandinsky's work! They started with pencil and then were encouraged to create a color scheme of 5 - 6 colors using oil pastels and lastly they watercolored their background.

Lines Lines Lines

Each of the lessons we do in the art room is based on the Elements of Art and are designed to start off simple and get more complex over time. The Kindergarten and First Grade students started off the year learning about all of the different lines that artists use to make art. We read the book Lines That Wiggle written by Candace Whitman, then we made a big list of all the lines from the story and looked for them around the classroom and the school. Next we explored making lines using different materials at centers; crayons, buttons, rocks, light boxes, paint and more!

International Dot Day

Welcome to the 2015-2016 school year! Things have been very busy in art so far this year, our K-5 students have been creating lots of thoughtful, beautiful and exciting works of art! To kick off the year we celebrated International Dot Day back on September 15! International Dot Day is inspired by Peter H. Reynold's book, The Dot and is all about persevering, making our mark, and being creative! These are all skills we will use thorough out the year in the art room and was a great way to jump right back into all of the excitement of making art together. All of the classes read the book, The Dot together then discussed the story before going onto work with an assortment of materials to make their own marks!

We also listed to the song version of the story as we painted, printed, collaged and more! 

Different classes explored making dots with different materials to make their dots, the 5th grade explored with some mono printing, first they painted a dot on tin foil then placed paper on top of it and pressed to transfer the image onto paper.

Some classes used water colors and others made collages! 

3rd Grade Collagraphs

Currently the 3rd grade students are working on a collagraph printmaking project. Students are using recycable materials that were picked up from the wonderful Beautiful Stuff Project , "The Beautiful Stuff Project is a new initiative providing free materials for creative reuse by teachers and children in the Somerville/ Cambridge area". For this project there was an emphasis on composition, movement, balance and texture.

3D Dream Houses

This spring, with the support of Kreg Hanning and the Lesley Tech Team here at KLO, we have been learning about the 3D printer as well as how to set it up and maintain it. Additionally have had a fantastic opportunity to run an after school class to pilot some 3D printing curriculum. For our first lesson we chose to use the book The Big Orange Splot for inspiration. First we read students the story and had a discussion about dream houses and what makes a house a house. We talked about how the houses in the story were imaginative and related to the character's interests; then we made a list of the things a house needs such as windows, doors and a roof. Students then did some sketching on paper before jumping into 3D designing. For their 3D modeling they used a program called Tinkercad.

In the Tinkercad software the students were encouraged to use the basic 3D shapes such as spheres, cylinders, cubes and triangular prisms to build with. They had to use skills such as rotating, scaling and aligning to build successful models. Once their designs were finished the teaching team ran them through the necessary programs to get them printer ready and then they were printed! 

Here are some photos of the models fresh from the 3D printer with their printing supports still attached.

After removing the supports, students will be using acrylic paint to finish their wonderful models.