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. 

2nd Grade Stop Motion

Art + Technology =  bringing our art to life! 

Currently our second graders are bringing all of their knowledge of drawing with shapes together with their technology skills to make beautiful stop motion animations of some of their favorite animals. 

The students started by drawing their animals in pieces, then we worked together to put all of the parts together so that the animals had the ability to move their heads, arms, legs, and or tails. 

Then the students created wonderful backgrounds for their animals and were ready to work at the animation stations (old copy paper boxes deconstructed and reconstructed into stands for their ipads)