Love, love, LOVE this little video about pumpkins!!! I used it last year with my October lessons and couldn't WAIT to use it again! It's just darling! For my kinders, I decided to go with a simple lesson on landscapes and horizon lines. We drew the ground and the sky and kept it pretty simple. Next, I put 4" orange squares on their tables and had them draw and cut out pumpkins for their pumpkin patch. They did a great job and this lesson goes to show that you don't have to have something over-the-top and extravagant to engage your students. Sometimes simple is best.
3rd graders yesterday afternoon learned about depth perception and overlapping while creating these spooky pumpkins. I like the effect of chalk on dark paper, so we started with a blue sheet of paper. The students drew the first pumpkin with an oil pastel right in the middle. Next, they drew the two side pumpkins a little bit smaller and behind the first one to show depth and overlapping. They colored inside the spaces with chalk pastels (VERY messy, btw) and cleaned up their drawing by re-tracing the oil pastel lines. Here are a few completed works of art:
My amazing 6th graders created these beautiful paper tree silhouettes. I showed them how to use the Portfolio water soluble oil pastels by drawing on their paper using lines that express rhythm and movement and spreading the color around their paper with a wet paintbrush. We talked about the color wheel and which colors will mix well together and which ones will look like 'mud' when mixed. The students chose what time of day they wanted to depict and which colors would best represent that particular time of day. While their paper was drying, we started to draw the trees. This is a difficult task to draw branches using lines that overlap, show thickness/thinness, and are connected together. Here are some of the finished projects:
For this project, I must have been hopped up on caffeine to be able to complete it in the allotted hour time-frame. First of all, I had to set out oil pastels, watercolors, watercolor brushes, acrylic paint, acrylic brushes, and paper towels for each student...whew. But, the results are so stunning, I felt like it was well worth the extra effort on my part. Here were the steps:
1. Fold the paper to create the horizon. 2. Draw the clouds with the white oil pastel, the tree trunks with the brown oil pastel, and the water waves with the blue oil pastel. 3. Use watercolor paint to paint the sky and the water. 4. Use the acrylic paint to 'dab' the foliage on the trees. 5. Re-fold the paper to make the reflection in the water. 6. Use a slightly wet watercolor brush to make short horizontal brushstrokes in the reflection to make it look like water.
I worked while the students did so they could follow one step at a time and see how quickly they needed to work to move on to the next step. Here are some finished paintings:
This is an adorable lesson that keeps the primary artists busy for the entire class period! I break it up into steps for the students to follow along to ensure success for everyone. Here are the steps:
1. Trace and cut-out the shapes for the scarecrow's shirt, pants, & hat using stencils and wallpaper scraps (set aside for later).
2. Discuss farmlands (the crops, colors, and lines). Draw the hills using curved lines and show the students how to repeat that same curved line in each hill to represent rows of crops.
3. Instruct the students on coloring each hill with a two-color pattern. Have them color the sky at this point, as well.
4. Next, glue down the parts for the scarecrow. I pre-cut scarecrow heads for my students and pass them out at this time.
5. Last, I give each student some "hay" (or raffia, as we art teachers call it) and two buttons to glue on their scarecrows.
For those of you who have caught on...I pick a theme and stick with it for a week or two. I let my primary classes do the same projects because #1: they are usually back-to-back on my schedule, #2: I don't usually repeat lessons year after year for specific grade levels (that requires way too much organization for this creative mind), and #3: I think they are just so cute that I cannot help but teach it to another class :)
So, here are my new and improved Sparkling Fall Trees:
I think the white paper looks much nicer than the tan paper I used the first time. I also took the opportunity to teach the students about foreground and background by making a hill that the tree is on and other hills behind the tree. And the handprints turned out much nicer this time because I had the students stamp their hands in the yellow first, orange second, and red last. I also gave them three paper towels so they could wipe off the color on their hands before stamping a new color. Much better results :)
Even though the trees are still green here in Missouri, I had to get a head-start on our Fall projects because I am in charge of the main bulletin boards at our district Administration Building during the month of October. So, here we are with an easy, safe, always exciting fall painting project.
When they entered the Art room, I had this video playing as they were seated and during the duration of the video, I talked to them about why the leaves change color in the fall and how that directly relates to the cooler temperatures and the shorter days - so we had a little Science lesson before beginning our Art project.
I usually do a project like this during the fall and the spring for my younger students because drawing trees is not only something that the students can relate to, but they can also learn how to draw using line variations. We talk about the thickness on lines, the length of lines, how lines can represent strength/weakness in art, how drawing from nature is NEVER perfect, how imperfections in art are acceptable, and so on. I usually have the students dot the leaves on the trees using their fingertips, but wanted to actually do hand prints this time.
Here are a few examples:
Sidney's Tree ( I like the splatter marks from slapping her hand down on the paper)
Amauria's Tree (I love the fingerprint leaves falling from the tree)
Aryn's Tree (This one shows the hand prints really well)
This was a project that I did with my sixth grade students, but can easily be done with any grade level. I like to use leaves as stencils during the Fall because it helps the students understand that there are many different kinds of leaves and different shapes. I also like the students to see, firsthand, the array of colors that leaves are this time of year. I had the students do a simple line/shape drawing of their leaf and then mount the leaf on a variety of colors of construction paper to create a 'rippling' effect, or a repeated shape pattern. We discussed composition in this assignment, and I had the students think about arranging their leaves in such a way that it looked like the leaves were falling from the trees.
This is a great seasonal lesson teaching about patterns, overlapping shapes, environments, and landscapes! First we started off the lesson discussing where we could find scarecrows and the purpose of scarecrows. Next, we used repeated curved lines to create overlapping hills for the farmland. I placed stencils for the shirt and the pants on each table so the students could trace the shapes on wallpaper scraps easily and not get frustrated (this trick, I learned the hard way). After we have all of the necessary elements on our page, the students were able to add raffia to the neck, hands and feet. This part, they LOVED!
This jack-o-lantern lesson can be used with any grade level and the results are so much fun. The students really got into thinking about what types of shapes they could cut-out to make the most interesting jack-o-lanterns. We discussed positive and negative space, symmetry, and reversed images. First, we started with the orange paper, folded it and drew only half of a pumpkin, added the features and cut them out (while the paper was still folded). Next, the students cut all of the pieces of paper that had a folded edge in half. Then, students put their jack-o-lanterns back together using only half of the pieces. To add some artistic flair to their work, students added line and shape designs to the orange paper with a black marker, and green or yellow designs to the black paper with a GelFx marker.
For students who do not celebrate Halloween, they can do the same project but instead of the jack-o-lantern, they can use random geometric and free-form shapes.
