“Ants at a Picnic” Weaving Project

This is a 3-day project for 2nd graders.

Day One:

For this mixed media project, we started by weaving the ‘tablecloth’. I had pre-cut strips of white paper and the kids cut their own looms from the red paper.

Day Two:

We talked about healthy foods vs. junk foods and drew some of our favorite foods. They drew with a black crayon on half-sheets of white paper. Here’s where the fun starts…we started by adding color with oil pastel, then we used BABY OIL with q-tips to blend the colors. These look awesome!

Day Three:

We cut out our food, made a plate by tracing a butter lid on black paper and put everything together.

They created a 3-D drink (with a straw!) and silverware.

Optional: Adding black ants crawling all over their picnic.

 

The easy way….Baby oil in trays on each table with q-tips. The kids are pretty good about keeping their hands clean and keeping oil off the table.

Here’s some of our finished products…but I don’t want to give too much away since these masterpieces are going in our art show!

Pop Art Popsicles with Kindergarten

So, I never use popsicle sticks, but I finally found a project that allows me to use them that isn't rinky-dink!

Day One: We learned how to mix primary colors together to make secondary colors...
I had them fold their paper in half a couple of times to make 8 boxes. They painted the primary colors first, then we mixed them together to fill the other boxes. They had 2 extra boxes they could paint a color or pattern of their choice in.

Here's a modification I made for one our students with special needs.

 

Day Two: Making Popsicles!

 

I started by telling the kids we were going to cut up our paintings from last week....the sheer looks of terror I got....

We drew a simple "U" shaped popsicle in each box. Some of my art challenges were to draw one with a bite taken out, one that was melting...etc.

We added shadows to each popsicle and a little white highlight. I think they understood what we were doing....haha. I explained that popsicles are frozen and ice is shiny, so to show that texture we needed a little reflection of light. Maybe that stuck with some of them...who knows, but they did it and their popsicles look awesome!

Wayne Thiebaud Paintings

I was looking through  "Wayne Thiebaud : A Paintings Reprospective" and I found some great paintings. I think he's one of my new favorite painters. 

I love these "farmscapes"

Wayne Thiebaud in his studio

Cityscapes....