Free Online Books!

Check out this website for books online:

http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/goodnight-goon-a-petrifying-parody#

...there's some great titles and you just flip through the pages on your computer.

Enjoy!

Nashville Beautification Contest

Art Truck Posters!

This year's theme:

Make Nashville Glitter - Pick up the Litter!

4th Grade Winner

Hailey G.

3rd Grade Winner

Roselin H.

There were so many awesome posters this year!

Here's some more great posters from 3rd and 4th grade...

It's Pumpkin Time!

1st Grade Pumpkin Heads

Okay, so I usually stay away from holiday-themed art projects, BUT Halloween is my favorite holiday so what's the harm in painting some pumpkins?

Our wonderful librarian let me borrow her book "It's Pumpkin Time!" by Zoe Hall...great book! Short and sweet...and the illustrations are great.

We've been squeezing some color theory in with this project: warm colors, blending, tints, color mixing....





Option 1: Painting with warm colors

Option 2: Add color with oil pastels

Cut out pumpkin

Collage face: white and black construction paper

I've been doing two versions of this lesson....one with paint: yellow, red and orange tempera / the other with oil pastels: yellow, orange and white---> This version works best if you only have one class period.

Oh and I am borrowing this lesson from DeepSpaceSparkle.com....because it's such an amazing resource!

After 3rd grade saw 1st grade leaving with their awesome pumpkins, they wanted to make one too....of course I caved because it's almost Halloween!

Kinder Robotic Self-Portraits

Here's a fun, yet messy lesson that I'm using to teach these little ones about proportion and full-body self-portraits. We are calling them "Robotic Self-Portraits" and I really like what they created!

First, we used black paint and recycled materials to "stamp" simple shapes to create a robot.

 I tried two different variations for adding color.  One class painted them using tempera cakes and the next time they came to art we used oil pastels to layer contrasting colors. I really like how some of these turned out.

love the attitude from Robo-Lucy

I cut the robots out and glued to some yellow construction paper for them since we are about to be on fall break.

I wanted to wrap this project up before fall break, so with my last class of the week I let them experiment with color mixing using tempera paint. We read "Mouse Paint", my favorite book ever, and then while they were painting, I played a BrainPopJr. video about mixing colors. They were so creative and came up with lots of great colors. I showed them how to make a "tint" and I heard them saying things like "Oh I just made a tint of blue!" And "How do you make purple again?" ...it was precious.

Painting with Tempera Cakes

Alexzander was making some cool colors...

Mixing colors on their palettes...

Collage Self-Portraits!

3rd Grade created these torn paper/mixed media collage self-portraits....

Step One: Tear one piece of 8.5" x 11" skin tone paper into chunks.







Create a shirt and add details...bowties, collars, pockets...



Step Three: Add eyes, a nose and a mouth...plus mixed media supplies: ribbons, buttons, feathers...

The Colors of Us

"The Colors of Us" by Karen Katz

Gallery of Faces

Great story and great tool for teaching about skin tones!

1st grade created these self-portraits through teacher guided-drawing steps using pencils, oil pastels and Crayola skin tone paint...
backgrounds created with crayons and tempera paint.

Adding skin tone

Here are some of the finished faces....