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!